The German Attitude - Fascinating

The German Attitude - Fascinating piece on David's Medienkritik yesterday from an American living in Germany, on the growing anti-American attitude he perceives among Germans.

I'm going to try to make a connection here.

In my comments on the academic roots of liberals' sense of entitlement to power and status yesterday, I quoted a Nozick piece at Cato that connected the sense of stimulus and reward that verbally-excellent children get in school with statist leanings later in life. Now - given what we're seeing among Germans, where the education system is even more centralized and striative (kids are "rewarded" for their "wordsmithing" and test-taking skills at about age 10, with the Abitur exams, which segregate them into University and vocational tracks), wouldn't the same phenomenon be compressed and amplified?

The connection seems valid, especially insofar as while the German academic and "wordsmith" classes seem to be stridently and increasingly anti-American, some of the less academic segments of German society still show indications of fraternity with us (as in the case of the crew of the German warship which "lined the rail" as an honorific for a passing US carrier on or about the 9/11 anniversary, an echo of the famous lining of the rail by the German destroyer Lütjens on passing the destroyer Churchill right after 9/11).

And the educational parallels hold up throughout Europe. Any Europeans in the audience care to comment?

Medienkritik has become daily reading for me this last few weeks. He runs all posts simultaneously in English and German. I love the site if only for the German practice I get - but it's a great site, and you should be reading it early and often.