French Adopt "Anglo-Saxon" Booze Habits

France has recently been idolized by the lickspittle trucklers in the US MSM for their opposition to Bush, which is the cardinal tenet of American media.

But in the large urban centers, according to the French press which I read in the original from time to time, French youth are adopting many of the habits of the Anglo/American popular culture, which a large number of them secretly look up to.

When I lived in France, I was there for almost a year before I made my first trip to the UK, in my BMW Bavaria bought with Vietnam hazardous-duty savings tax-free because of my diplomatic status and duty-free. I had French license plates and immediately was treated rudely by the Brit drivers able to spot my driver's seat on the wrong side and my tentative driving habits.

But what struck me more about the British after a couple of days in London was the prevalence of public drunkenness, which I discovered derived from the strange pub hours which encouraged drinkers to chug a few for the road before the closing time of 10PM. The Brit nanny-state Puritanism had caused these rules and regs, which had the unintended consequence of causing rapid drinking and binge behavior in the working classes and pub crawlers.

Now, if the Reuters piece and my own French reading is correct, the younger jeunesse are adopting these habits, which usually entail shifting from wine to beer. As the French drink beer cold instead of the Brit warm ale, there is a continental shift in the effects of the alcohol. Cold beer seems to go down even faster than warm ale, if my college recollections are correct. A short few months living in London in 1990 out in Kingston acquainted me more with the British pub tradition, which is staid and stolid compared with US drinking establishments.

The average French secretly admire the British [and even more so, the Germans] for a number of reasons. Read Les Carnets de Major Thompson for a hilarious excursion through the French love/hate relationship with the Brits.

Now that Chirac is definitely not running again for President and his toady PM Dominique is fading out of the picture, there will be a new French relationship between its citoyens and its ruling elites. There's an old saw about France being a Republic which functions like a monarchy and Britain is a monarchy which is run like a democracy.

Perhaps the French "social model" will evolve, if Sarkozy and the UMP right are victorious next year, in the direction of the Anglo-American economic "liberal" model and the EU continentals can begin again to work with, rather than at cross purposes, with its offshore allies.

Oops, hadn't seen this NYT article describing Sarkozy's four-day trip in the USA before I filed the masterpiece above!