1. In “Santiago” (a short story collection) Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet describes this sort of American in a provocative and, I think, accurate fashion:“The facial features of that type betray not just a long-suffering life, but really a borderline personality. In the United States, more than in any other part of the world, one runs into those faces in the streets, or in stores like Walmart or Payless; faces that reveal a severe degree of functional madness. One only sees them in the United States. They’re people that have put up with more abuse or solitude than a person is capable of tolerating. One sees poverty everywhere — in some places more than in others — but those American faces are the faces that I fear the most: those jaws dislocated from so much time spent talking to themselves, those bug-eyes they get from watching so much T.V.”[1a]