Dear Representative Lee: I’m writing to express my heartfelt congratulations for your re-election. Fact is, while it wasn’t going to take a blue tsunami to return you to the House1, it is a nice circumstance. And I was definitely going to vote for you anyway: one of the advantages of it having been Squirrel Hill that I left for Zürich-Höngg eighteen years ago is that I’m frozen in time in the 14th Ward of Pittsburgh for electoral purposes. ...
Dear Senator Fetterman: I’m writing first and foremost so that your staff can increment the “constituent says don’t support Chuck Schumer for Senate Majority Leader” counter. I have little faith that this action will have any effect in the real world. Indeed, I have a mixed record with this genre: in the small hours of October 25, 2001, I posted an open letter to Rick Santorum, then also a senator from Pennsylvania, urging him to oppose the USA PATRIOT Act. The Senate passed it later that day, ninety-eight to one. He was not the one. A big difference between you and Santorum is that I supported you. Indeed, if memory serves, this was the last thing I posted publicly on Twitter, before it got xombiefied, to the acclaim of two whole likes. ...
For the next decade or so, the southern edge of my small home city on the north side of Zürich will be a complex linear construction site, after which we’ll have a segment of a bicycle highway between Zürich and the upper Glatt Valley, and a mostly-brand-new train station with two additional platforms connecting to a new tunnel straight to Winterthur. This is great. But in the meantime, that complex linear construction site has been placed directly over what used to be my bicycle commute, which gave me the opportunity to find a new one. ...
As a left-leaning white kid who grew up in what turned out to be a dying Southern city, going from a fully-integrated Montessori elementary school in a neighborhood named after the white flight it later suffered to an East Memphis middle school whose history includes a massive expansion of its boarding program for Little Rock families resisting integration in the 1960s, I’m exactly the type of person you’d expect to point to the premature end of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877 as the point at which it All Went Wrong. ...
I waited long enough to write about Kein 10-Millionen Schweiz that I get to do so in the past tense, with a sense of relief, albeit incomplete. Yes, dear reader, the Swiss People’s Party ran yet another Schwarzenbach referendum to attempt to create their little island without resorting to kinetics, and despite some fear based on early polling numbers that maybe this time they’d managed to do it, with a campaign that tried (but ultimately failed) to break from their explicitly fascist house style (in the sense of “blame foreigners for everything, including the traffic caused by your own love of cars, and do it mostly with red, white, and black ink”), we will once again not be Doing A Swexit. ...
A year and some after Switzerland’s plucky protofascist poster art collective cum Trumpist political party, the SVP (Swiss People’s Party), screamed Verfassungsbruch! (lit. “Constitution break!”; fig., accusative: “you’re breaking the Constitution!”) on the floor of Parliament at the admitted non-implementation of their unimplementable vandalism of the Swiss constitution in the name of nativism, they’re back at it again with the almost-reasonable-sounding Selbstbestimmungsinitiative (lit. “self-determination initiative”; SBI if you’re into hashtags). One has to read the details to see how broken it is. Let’s have a look. ...
I don’t think I’ve ever written a completely optimisic post about politics, but today seems as good a day as any to try. Today was an Abstimmungssonntag (“referendum Sunday”) here, and the most important question before Switzerland at the national level was a revocation of the federal government’s authority to levy a compulsory television and radio fee: NoBillag. I’ve already written about this referendum, and how it represented not a mere return of four hundred francs per year to every household, not a mere privatization of a few television and radio stations (one of which I’m listening to right now), but a frontal assault on public media and an attempt to drive the country’s media landscape into low-information territory; in other words noch ein Schritt zum kriechenden Beitritt der Schweiz in die vereinigten Staaten(1). ...
My opinion on Billag(1) is complicated. It seems like it could fairly simply be replaced by payments from the general fund, overseen by a non-political body to evaluate applications for funding from SRF and regional providers. What we have in NoBillag, instead, is an attempt to Americanize the Swiss media landscape. Thankfully, I’m not the first to point this out, and I hope I won’t be the last. tl;dr, hey Switzerland, you want Bundesrat Trump? Because NoBillag is how you get Bundesrat Trump. ...
On the shores of Lake Sarnen in central Switzerland, there’s a museli factory. (Of course there is.) It makes many different kinds of muesli for various markets. One of these is an organic chocolate-amaranth concoction that’s basically the only thing my daughter will eat for dinner this week. I happened to glance at the ingredients, and it occurred to me that there are basically three kinds of people in the world. ...
This is going to make me sound somewhat more libertarian than I actually am, but here goes: The most important duty of a state is its effective control over and responsible application of the monopoly on violence, delegated to it by its citizens, in the service of the protection of its citizens, and the protection of all people present within its territory. All the other trappings of statehood — a currency, a post office, universal healthcare, the name of your state on a placard at the UN General Assembly, some transportation infrastructure of some sort, passports, some stamps you can apply to passports issued by other states, a national Olympic team and/or Eurovision Song Contest entry (as appropriate), a flag — are nice to have, but not really essential. ...