This is an artilce that is currently featuring on BBC News. Basically, it's a recollection of some middle class Englishman who's spent a few years in the US and is writing about it for folks back home.

Be intersted in any comments from US (and non US) residents.

Few snips:

QuoteAfter De Tocqueville, just about every European sent to the United States has treated the posting as an invitation to help diagnose the country's faults and suggest ways in which they might be fixed.

Americans find this a little puzzling.

............

To Europeans, for example, a gun is a weapon, pure and simple. ...........

An American is more likely to visualise a plucky homesteader crouching between an overturned sofa in a burning ranch house, preparing to defend his family to the death.

..............

Its newspapers - with one or two exceptions - are awful.

Endless sub-clauses roam across prairies of newsprint in search of the point, like homesteader wagons on the Oregon trail circling around a knackered old buffalo

................

America has enormous debts but it still spends as much money on defence as all the rest of the world put together.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9294890.stm

Another installent, this time written by an American, no less. The English middle classes will wetting themselves as they reach for their dettol and shotguns.

Quote"American exceptionalism" is the trend-topping topic of conversation in the US at the moment.

.......

Conservative politicians explaining why Britain should not develop closer ties with the European Union would tell me: "We are an island nation." The implication is: "We are different from those nations of the continent precisely because we have no borders with anything but the sea."

........

All the post-election talk in the US about my native land's exceptionalism, has reminded me of that phrase: "We are an island nation."

The idea of British exceptionalism - actually it is more English exceptionalism, as the Scots and the Welsh feel equally unique - can be backed up by historically minded Brits.

They will tell a swaggering American a tale of a small island off the coast of Europe - an island that has not felt an invader's footstep since 1066, a people which until recent times ruled half the globe through naval and commercial prowess, and produced Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Newton, Faraday and Darwin.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12052320

The writer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Goldfarb

That was a good read, spacial.  Thanks.