The Germans have a joke about the fact that you cannot sell a ladder in the United States that is under six feet tall, because there wouldn’t be enough room for all of the required safety stickers. American laws and lawsuits are pretty ridiculous, but not that ridiculous. I know this for a fact, because I own a three foot step ladder, and all the safety warnings take up only a little more than the backside of just one of the steps, the edge of a step, and two supports beams. There is room for nearly two more steps worth of descriptions of the potential hazards of challenging gravity, even with the Spanish translations included.

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.

The world’s richest man is a Mexican, the world’s biggest city is in Japan, and the world’s tallest building is in some Middle Eastern country, but that doesn’t stop the United States from being the most superlative country in the world.

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.

One phenomenon that occurs every 4 years is that Americans elect a president that most Germans either love or hate, while almost paradoxically, most Americans are never quite satisfied with their elected Command in Chief. This is easily explained away as a bi-product of our current two party system, which ensures that Americans cannot be represented by an official who represents average Americans.

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.

Americans are known throughout the world as being somewhat more morbidly obese than most, but that characterization is unfair. Some of us are also anorexic.

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.

One major freedom that Americans cherish deeply is the freedom of religion, which is granted in the very first amendment to the Constitution, as part of the Bill of Rights. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”  From this little part of a sentence, most Americans believe they live in a country with a complete separation of church and state, and this is true except on Christmas, when all of the government employees and students in public institutions get to take the day off for Jesus’ Birthday Bash.

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.