Aux Etats-Unis

I am starting to wonder if the best way to understand your own culture and heritage isn't just to leave it. Or, ask someone who is visiting from another.
I just read the Kite Runner which is a book about a boy's life who lived a large part of it in Afghanistan and also America. It is filled with anecdotes, customs, and the language of another culture from my own. I was fascinated. It was unlike anything I knew in America. It was also a really interesting story. (I do recommend it, but with a warning that it is difficult because it is an emotionally heavy book).
Having finished a novel set in Afghanistan and an Afghani community in America, I decided to take up a couple of novels by Americans about Americans. I reread A River Runs Through It and without reservation recommend it to anybody and everybody. I am also just about a third of the way into a book by Wendell Berry called Jayber Crow.
As I was just getting up from reading Jayber Crow, my thoughts turned back to Kite Runner. I was thinking about how fascinated I was because it was a culture unlike my own and because I was just so curious about this complete other life style I was living. I could pick out instantly what was novel and interesting. They seemed to have such a fascinating culture of proverbs, religion, heritage, music and general way of life. It was destroyed even within the course of the novel, but it was unique. I started to wonder if people from places like Afghanistan read books about America and are fascinated about it the same way I am about their cultures (by the way I love novels about cultures that are not strictly Western. I don't always like their philosophies but I love a good story). Oddly enough, my first thought was, "of course they don't think like that. There is nothing unique about your culture. Your culture is just an amalgam of other cultures. There is nothing distinctly American. America is not a heritage or an ethnicity." This is how I have always felt about being American to be honest. I jokingly allow myself to be called Jewish, but sometimes I like it because it identifies me with a long tradition and culture. Its roots go so much further back than anything I could latch onto tightly from America. My family is like most Midwestern American families. We have lots of Western European heritage and a little Native American. But, nothing as strong as say being Jewish.
I am not exactly how to define American culture and heritage. I do know that reading a book like Jayber Crow just feels like a novel, not something distinctly American. I realized how hard it is to define something that is commonplace to you. Something you have grown up seeing and knowing your whole life can't seem unique. Its what you know. Its all you know for a long time. It becomes necessary to compare what you know to other cultures to really get a sense of what is distinctly yours. It is much easier for me to find what I am not than what I am. I can look around me and point out stuff that isn't American, Midwestern, Missourian, or St. Louisan. I do it everyday. Yet, it is really difficult for me to say that is American and that is special and unique (except for McDonalds and Walmart. That is originally American but even it seems less American as it is so commonplace everywhere now.)
I guess people just like to have something to call their roots. Some greater story or family line to be a part of, at least I do. I want to know where I came from and what part I can play in where that is headed.