I think I do understand your point, but I think that my statement has more emotional content for you than it does for me.
I've spent significant amounts of time in a few different cultures and through that I have developed deep appreciation for the various dimensions in which cultures differ and, like the famous story of the fish in the water, how it's inherently impossible to realise what is cultural and what is not until you enter a culture which exists on different point in these dimensions.
If you're familiar with Hofstede's work [1] he already provides us with five cultural dimensions he found most salient and useful in describing cultural differences.
I merely posited that, based on my experience and compared to Dutch culture, the US I saw was far on the far end of a dimension I would call "distance between the projected identity and real-world behaviour." This manifested it in all sorts of ways, from abstinence only education and large amounts of teen pregnancy, to being harsh on drug use but doing it much more than I was used to, to the more well known examples of exaggeration on resumes being the norm.
It is also not surprising that this is the dimension that was most salient to my mind, since Dutch culture is famous for being extremely parsimonious and straight-forward so the cultural distance on this dimensions is probably very large.
P.S. Hofstede is actually a Dutchman, so interestingly enough this perspective itself could very well be a Dutch cultural trait, perhaps caused by us being among the earliest cultures who conducted world-wide trade.
