The Complexity of "Normal"

This is from my textbook, Learning from the Stranger: Christian Faith and Cultural Diversity.

Consider the following description of a U.S. Citizen's morning routine from 1936. Consider your idea of being "an American", raised in American culture, while reading it:

Our solid American citizen awakens in a bed built on a pattern which originated in the Near East but which was modified in Northern Europe before it was transmitted to America. He throws back covers made from cotton, domesticated in India, or silk, the use of which was discovered in China... He slips into his moccasins, invented by the Indians of the Eastern woodlands, and goes to the bathroom... He takes off his pajamas, a garment invented in India, and washes with soap invented by the ancient Gauls. He then shaves, a masochistic rite which seems to have been derived from either Sumer or ancient Egypt.

Returning to the bedroom, ... he puts on garments whose form originally derived from the skin clothing of the nomads of the Asiatic steppes, puts on shoes made from skins tanned by a process invented in ancient Egypt and cut to a pattern derived from the classical civilization of the Mediterranean, and ties around his neck a strip of bright-colored cloth which is a vestigial survival of shoulder shawls worn by the seventeenth-century Croatians. Before going out for breakfast he glances through the window, made out of glass invented in Egypt, and if it is raining ... takes an umbrella, invented in southeastern Asia.

On the way to breakfast he stops to buy a paper, paying for it with coins, an ancient Lydian invention. At the restaurant... his plate is made of a form of pottery invented in China. His knife is of steel, an alloy first made in southern India, his fork a medieval Italian invention, and his spoon a derivative of a Roman original... he may have an egg of a species of bird domesticated in Indo-China, or thin strips of flesh of an animal domesticated in East Asia which have been salted and smoked by a process developed in northern Europe.

When our friend has finished eating he ... reads the news of the day, imprinted in characters invented by the ancient Semites upon a material invented in China by a process invented in Germany. As he absorbs the accounts of foreign troubles he will, if he is a good conservative citizen, thank a Hebrew deity in an Indo-European language that he is 100 per cent American.