A real American

I've been reading a lot about cultural values related to sex, love and marriage lately, and in the middle of this somewhat puzzling article in The Atlantic I found this delightful paragraph:

Even though she was born in Belgium and schooled in Israel, and speaks eight languages, she is fundamentally, deeply American—indeed, announcing that you speak eight languages is a deeply American thing to do. (As I write, I am living in Crete, where half the people who wash floors in hotels speak eight languages and don’t tell you.) Perel is American in both the best sense and the worst in which Europeans use the term: She is American in her can-do conviction that people will live happily ever after. She is American also in her self-promotion (“My husband is the director of the International Trauma Studies Program at Columbia University … My parents were survivors of Nazi concentration camps,” she tells us, as though this bore on her thesis). She is American, finally, in her unquestioning assumption that we should work like hell on our sex lives.

Still not sure what to make of the article itself, but that paragraph is spot-on.