Nearly a century ago, the noted journalist, cultural critic, essayist, and—this is important: satirist— H.L. Mencken wrote of his fellow Americans, sounding very much like a British journalist dispatched to our sprawling land to take its pulse and assess its mood, “What makes America charming is precisely the Americans…They are, by long odds, the most charming people that I have ever encountered in this world.” Knowing better than to completely trust Mencken’s often pointed satire, I was waiting for a punch line or at the very least an elaboration of his almost chirpy salute to the American persona. It didn’t…