An Englishman's View Of Americans

By Steve Sailer on March 14, 2014 at 11:36am
In Tom Stoppard's short play New-Found-Land, two government clerks in London are reviewing an American immigrant's application to become a British subject. The more elderly reflects:
BERNARD: Americans are a very modern people, of course. They are a very open people too. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. They don't stand on ceremony. They take people as they are. They make no distinction about a man's background, his parentage, his education. They say what they mean and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. They admire everything [around] them without reserve or pretence of scholarship. They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you, and are irrepressibly goodhumoured, ambitious, and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that I've got nothing against them.