While we were travelling around we used to play a game which we called, "Spot the American" in which the point, as you can easily guess, is to correctly identify which of the people around us were Americans, without hearing them talk. It is a version of a game I used to play with some of my students called "China, Japan, Korea" in which my task was to correctly guess their country of origin without hearing them speak. My students seemed to think that all Americans thought all Asians looked alike. Of course, we don't, and they don't. While we travelled in Europe, we also liked to play "Spot the Czech", a game which was satisfying because Thomas and I both were equally good at it, and we found it even more fun once we realized that the Vienese usually thought we were Czech.
There are a couple of ways to spot the American: white athletic shoes, baseball caps, t-shirts, and blue jeans are big hints, but the dead give away is that the caps and the t-shirts are likely to have some kind of writing on them. From the overabundance of shirts and caps (and even underwear) in WalMart, you would think that having such a shirt were some kind of requirement. The content of this writing varies wildly from the religious ("Real Men Love Jesus") to the crude "Ask me about my explosive diarrhea", or obscene ("SL_T: all I need is U") or sexist ("If you can read this, the bitch fell off"--to be worn by male motorcyclists and "If you can read this, I pushed the bastard off"--for the woman) to the satirical ("I don't have a drinking problem: I drink, I get drunk, I fall down. No problem"), the political ("Make love, not war" "Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery""Support stem-cell research: grow Bush a brain"), those sporting ethnic pride ("It's a black thing. You wouldn't understand" or "American by birth, Southern by the grace of God"), and... you get the picture. You can see the slideshow. All of this got me to thinking and wondering, if Czechs went in for this kind of thing, what would your shirts say? BTW. I have only one such shirt "Jesus loves you, but I'm his favorite."
