If the Germans decide a law is bad, they work on changing it. If Americans decide a law is a bad one, we simply start ignoring it. For this reason we have lots of antiquated laws still on the books that are just no longer enforced. Plus there are the odd multi-million dollar frivolous lawsuits now and then, for which we are famous, but those are generally thrown out or overruled. The United States has more lawyers per capita than pretty much any other country, so they have to create ways to keep themselves busy.

The right to sue anyone for any reason is a right Americans hold dear. The American dream used to be to go from a dishwasher to a millionaire, and it still is, except that the millions of dollars come from compensation for emotional distress from the chopping off the tip of your finger while operating the industrial dishwasher while being forced to work overtime on a holiday.

No American exemplifies this passionate pursuit of legal rectification better than Jonathan Lee Riches, a prisoner in South Carolina, who has filed over 3,800 lawsuits. Not only has he sued former President George W. Bush along with Steve Jobs and a handful of professional athletes, he has filed suit against Plato, the Eiffel Tower, and the Holy Roman Empire. Unfortunately, he is certain to sue me for libel as the author of this piece, as soon as he catches wind of its publication.

The most famous frivolous lawsuit is the infamous case of McDonald’s serving coffee that is hot, without first warning its customers that the beverage that is typically served hot is being served hot. But the truth is that McDonald’s was serving the coffee so hot, about 85C, that it would actually cause third degree burns. The plaintiff, 79 year old Stella Liebeck, was severely burned and actually spent eight days in the hospital, so she clearly deserved the nearly three million dollars that the jury awarded her, but unfortunately the trial judge reduced the amount to only $640,000.

Whether you are visiting Austin, Texas, the live music capital of the world, Alma, Arkansas, the spinach capital of the world, or Rain, Louisiana, the frog capital of the world, you will never be disappointed by American ignorance of the significance of their relative ranks in insignificant classifications.

Americans are number one, no matter what. We may have to invent our own sports to prove it, but we also know that soccer is a sport for poor people, and poor people are the ones who don’t get to live in the United States.

If you imagine the political spectrum flattened to two dimensions, left and right, and then plot the distribution of where people fall in this spectrum, you would get a Gaussian curve, which looks a bit like this.

The average American is more conservative than the German and thinks the death penalty is a good idea and that government controlled health care is not. The average American can come to terms with electrocuting a serial killer, but shies away from public stoning of infidels, and is therefore a bit more liberal than the average Saudi.

Unfortunately, in our current political climate, in nearly every political race in the United States, two major candidates win the backing of their political parties in preliminary races, which we call “primaries”. Here only Republicans vote to determine their candidate, and Democrats vote separately to determine their candidate. The primaries split the electorate into two distributions, where the average voter becomes more like the average German for the Democrats, or more like the average Saudi for the Republicans.

This is why Americans must seem bipolar to Germans, voting in Bush, then Clinton, then Bush, then Obama. To Germans this seems like going from completely wrong, to completely right, to completely wrong, and then back to completely right. To Americans though, it is just wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

You may wonder to yourself, how such a land of diverse heritage could contain such unhealthy waist lines, but the answer is clear, once you have a closer look.  There are socio-economic factors, infrastructural challenges, and pie that all contribute to our imbalance.

First of all, Americans do a poor job of subsidizing nutritious foods. We pay our potential farmers not to grow foods, to keep the prices of fresh vegetables artificially high.  When compared to grocery store prices, fast food becomes arguably cheaper that cooking at home, and certainly more convenient.  And we don’t just have Burger King and McDonald’s to choose from. You can have dinner served to you in a sack every night of a month at a national fast food chain and never eat at the same restaurant twice, even in a month that has thirty-one days.

But the main culprit in the creation of our wobbliness is Autumn. Autumn probably exists in other countries as well, but in America Autumn is particularly dubious. Starting in late September here, the weather begins turning crisp, leaves start turning shades other than green, and stores begin putting out candy for Halloween. Lots and lots of candy for Halloween. While there is nothing inherently wrong with candy in its own right, Halloween candy is particular troublesome because it comes individually wrapped in a size called “fun”.  Although you are angered by mega-corporations calling miniature size portions of candy fun size, when fun size would technically be giant sized candies, you are forced to buy huge bags of these tiny candies to hand out to adorable children plus the annoying, awkward tweens which show up at your doorstep dressed in costumes demanding treats. And since you don’t want to be the creepy neighbor who had to tell the kids that they don’t have any candy for them, you are even forced to buy three or four times the necessary amount, just to be on the safe side. Which means you are left with enough tiny packages of candy to last until Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is the time when American stores start forcing you to buy egg nog. Egg nog is not particularly delicious, so it could never make it as a viable product on its own, but it is just good enough to become an integral part of Autumn. Egg nog contains spices, cream, sugar, and eggs, and contains 327 calories per sip. Egg nog is the only drink known to man that actually becomes healthier per unit volume as you add grain alcohol to it. Plus at Thanksgiving, you eat a lot of pies.

Autumn is rounded out by Christmas, where people find it necessary to bake cookies for you, and people cover pretzels in white chocolate. When Christmas festivities are finally over, and Autumn is finally over, Americans realize that things have gotten out of hand, and that their New Year’s resolution will be to get things under control by either training for a marathon or becoming anorexic. Most of us do neither.

A hot topic for the past hundred years has been whether students should take part in prayer in public schools.  Parents whose faith aligns with the majority in the region  deem such prayer completely appropriate, but parents whose religious beliefs put their family in the minority spoil it for everyone else and contribute to moral decay by suing the local school districts for their sponsorship of public deity chat, no matter if its in the middle of the school day or simply at a school sponsored event, such as a football game or the graduation speech given by the nerd who got the best grades that year.

In the fine print of the Constitution, buried away in Article 6, there is a clause which states that no religious test shall ever be required as qualification to hold office in the United States. While this may be technically true, voters in America take a candidates’ religious views very seriously. Many Americans would vote for someone running on the wrong ticket before voting for someone praying to the wrong Almighty. Also of note, the state of Texas follows along with the no religious test clause in its own constitution, but adds the caveat, that the office holder must acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being. For Texans, just picking any one from hundreds of contradicting religions is good enough.

Americans have been pretty good at ridding their government and its products of any religious symbols, but still some remain.  Several courthouses have been forced to remove statues featuring the Ten Commandments, but “In God we Trust” remains imprinted on our money, and our children still say “one nation under God” in their daily pledge of allegiance. And no matter how hard you try to get a beer before noon on Sunday in Michigan, your pleas about the separation of church and state aren’t going to help, so you might as well just go to Mass and wait it out.

Americans have come to terms with the fact that, although all men are created equal, their ability to bring home the bacon diverges immensely, but that the free market which dictates their salaries is the best way to spread the wealth the furthest; be it equal or not. The only time Americans find the system unfair is in the case of professional athletes, who get paid to do the things the rest of us have to pay to do.

In 1987 Michael Douglas famously told us, “Greed is good.” And up until recently, we sort of believed him. Now Americans are considering some regulation to throttle that back some. In the mean time, greed has become only good provided that you don’t wreck the global financial system with your actions. In America, the top 1% richest people control 34% of the wealth of the country, and that is just fine by us, because they deserve it. Probably.

We do have a sign to tell everyone around you that you believe someone is crazy. With your pointer finger pointed at the side of your head, make circular motions originating with your elbow revolving around your ear. Frantically waving your hand in front of your own face, makes you yourself look pretty crazy in our eyes. We will probably assume you are trying to play peek-a-boo after taking too much methamphetamine.

If you start squeezing your thumb, we will have assumed that you just smashed it with a hammer, because we cross our index and middle fingers while we hope for good luck. Another gesture that will leave us pondering about what you could possibly be talking about, is the gesture where you repeatedly pull your skin down under your eye with your index finger. What is that about, anyway?

If you want to politely get some one’s attention, as in when you know the correct answer to your boss’s rhetorical question in a meeting, do no put your hand up in the air and start snapping your fingers. Americans consider snapping fingers to get attention to be deeply condescending and a bit rude. Instead just hold your hand high in the air and wait patiently until someone begrudgingly yields the opportunity to speak to you. American kids generally have some trouble with patience and begin making an “ooh ooh ooh” sound like a seal,  while struggling to force their right arm even higher in the air with their left hand. This, however, is not advisable in a board meeting. Also, once the meeting is over, do not start knocking your knuckles on the table in agreement.

Since not all Americans live up to the expectations of society, American products have built in crutches to assist us. When you buy a car in America, it will often include a digital compass, so that when you are told that the nearest Jack in the Box is three miles north of here, you will know how to get there.

American highways have signs telling you whether you are going to be driving North, South, East, or West once you enter them. This is obviously better than in Germany, since the only piece of information you need to know when finding your destination is which direction it is in, instead of having to memorize every single city in the country and their relative locations before you hit the road.

American companies really only have the chance to discriminate based on the names of your schools and previous employers, before they have the chance to discriminate on more baseless measures.

First they need to contact you and get your consent to screen you for drug use, criminal activity, or much worse, a history of not paying your bills.  American companies hate the idea of giving a job to someone who really needs the money.

German companies on the other hand expect you to send in a formal application in the mail containing photos of your face, along with the “Lebenslauf”, a complete history expected to contain no gaps in time. With the complete package, German companies can save themselves a lot of effort, whereas American companies have to first arrange a phone interview to get initial clues about your age and race, since the provided names in the application may not reveal this information with much certainty.

If the phone screening goes well, and the candidate seems to pass muster,  an onsite interview is held for final insurance that no wrong ones slip through the cracks. We should definitely look to the German model to prevent such waste.

First of all, Americans value the freedom of speech to such an extreme degree, that we allow people to say whatever stupid things they might want to say. So as long as you don’t check the box on the form to enter America stating that you are or were a member of the Nazi party, you are basically free to spout out whatever comes to your mind as soon as you have made it through customs. We will think you are crazy, but we won’t stop you.

But the most important reason, why being a nazi in America is okay, is that the word has a totally different meaning here. Over the years the term nazi has come to indicate any unfavorable person who simply enforces the rules too strictly, especially when the majority of people don’t particularly care about adhering to the rule in question, which is almost always this case in the United States.

So don’t be too surprised the first time you hear someone referred to as a grammar nazi, a yard nazi, or a soup nazi; it’s really not as bad as it sounds.