The weeks and weeks of paid vacation, the work hours, the perks, the security...

Yeah, sure, its not the american way- and there are plenty of things to rip on (just like here). No system is perfect, our isn't... theirs isn't... But they have done a damn fine job of building a society based on leisure and the pursuit of personal passions.

Just a hint. If the best we can do in the culture 'war' that we started is to find the occassional horror story (of which we have in spades), and these amorphous moral arguments about how their system is somehow innately evil (where with different assumptions on values, ours can be argued against in the same way)... Then we're not doing too good.

D