That piece resonated with me. In the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America), sometimes it takes a fascinated outsider to draw a properly nuanced picture of what it really means to be an American.
To be fair, it's from the POV of someone who's managed to spend eight years in a society without learning how to tell a joke to a stranger, but there's a reason why they say, "Americans think 100 years is a long time, and the English think 100 miles is a long way."