This is an issue of the newspaper of the 1990 student takeover of the university of Siena. I was there studying Italian, a junior "semester abroad", as was the custom of the time.

In response to privatizing reforms announced by the national education minister, students took over universities across the country in protest, played their guitars, served spaghetti dinners, and provided their own alternative curriculum. The University of Siena is mostly housed in what was once a Franciscan monastery, and we kids from the Universitá per Stranieri would go down there and partake. (It was awfully hospitable of them to schedule something so thrilling, educational, and Italian for us while we were there). It was also as if a chain of free squatters' hotels had opened up across Italy: I remember travelling to Florence and sleeping on the floor of an occupied classroom there.

The cartoon depicts the twentieth anniversary of that revolution... which is, of course, today. (The caption says "Twentieth anniversary of the [Occupation of] '90: the usual pain-in-the ass interviews with the repentant 90ers")

So, about science fiction:

See those awesome shoulder flanges on the reporter?

That's how we dress now.

See his big-ass reel-to-reel tape recorder?

That's how we record interviews!

(I liked it, if you were wondering; more than my kids did, I think, though they liked it too.

Unlike most of the movies my children and I watch together, it is a movie about being a child. Not a middle-aged superhero, a twentysomething restaurateur, or a grownup who must give up their self-imposed or chance isolation to fall in love, found a family, and take responsibility for larger projects. That's what we otherwise mostly watch, because that's what Pixar, Dreamworks, and company make: movies about early adult coming-of-age and midlife crisis, courtship and marriage -- with a lot of chase scenes, goofiness, pratfalls, snark, thrills, and hero-saves-the-day thrown in for buoyancy.

Dave Eggers and Spike Jones made a dark, slow, creepy, spare, gentle movie about being a kid, a movie which remembers that being a kid is very often a terrifying, daunting, and miserable affair. It has no pratfalls. The chase scenes, such as they are, are more Blair Witch than Tom & Jerry. It has no heroes, and the day is not saved; though of course, in the end, dinner is still hot. )

I added the bit on the right hand side; click for detail.

Time Eigenvalues for the One-dimensional Infinite Square Well

What a wonderful thing to be asked.

Here's what I said:

Wow, well, I'd say there are a few things that come to mind immediately.

One is to look for what she responds to and then milk that vein mercilessly. When Aviva was her age we also did a lot of storytelling, and she really liked slapstick (both of mine do) and was also obsessed with (and worried about) allergies and addiction (in the general sense of lack of self control, like wanting candy). So we had a long-running saga about Aviva's daughter-doll Cereina and her best friend, Elisa's daughter-doll Sophie, both of whom were black belts in karate (the kind that can fly) and Sophie was addicted to, and allergic to, Twizzlers. Thus they would fight epic, cinematic battles (diving off bridges onto zeppelins, that kind of thing), in which Cereina would try to confiscate the Twizzlers that Sophie had gotten ahold of, because they were bad for her.

That was a theme that never ran out of gas.

Second, amuse yourself too. No point telling stories dutifully. I mean, there's a balance, you don't want to be JUST amusing yourself and the kid is tolerating you. But you don't want to go totally in the other direction, or you'll quit. Tap into your inner Rocky and Bullwinkle. There can be jokes in there she'll only get in ten years (when she'll suddenly burst out laughing for no reason)

Third, don't get stressed about quality or originality. You can retell life events, movie plots, whatever, changing the details to fit the kids' preoccupations. Steal, steal, steal. Stoop to old cliches. Reprise the Hero's Journey, even if you only know it from Star Wars. Insert improbable coincidences and deus ex machina endings and bad puns (even if you have to explain them). You can have her meet fairy tale figures and travel in time to meet later and earlier versions of herself. There doesn't always need to be a narrative arc, you can just keep throwing cool crap against the wall and see what sticks. You will probably never again have such a forgiving, enthusiastic audience.

Fourth, you don't HAVE to tell stories. It's okay to say, "naw, I'm too tired now." You have to set some limits if it's going to stay fun. It will just whet her appetite for more, if you are straight and uncomplicated about it. (Though if you ALWAYS say no for a while she may get out of the habit.)

The MIR is what you do when you see a movie partially of great merit (amazing CGI, the occasional decent performance, many scenes with refreshingly correct physics) but also deep and unforgivable flaws (moral idiocy, plot illogic, absurd lapses of characterization, taste, etc.), and, wanting to enjoy the experience, you ask yourself "what is the minimum amount of stuff we would have to add offscreen to make this make sense"?

A classic example is Keith Martin's "A New Sith", which makes the Star Wars hexology make a great deal more sense (and improves it otherwise) by positing R2D2 and Chewbacca as secret leaders of the rebellion.

Here's another, for The Matrix (just the first movie, not the latter two, which are unredeemable):

The first Matrix movie is not bad, right? It almost makes sense. The only thing that doesn't make sense to anyone with the remotest grasp of physics or biology is the assertion that malevolent AIs who destroyed the ecosphere keep humans alive (in, by their own account, the nicest environment that the humans' brains will tolerate) as batteries. Like the little Duracell battery that Morpheus holds up. WTF? Also, Morpheus' apparent lack of a plan (and apparent total unconcern) for what will happen when they kill of the robots and "free" all of the humans to roam the bleak, lifeless, sunless, destroyed earth.

The MIR is hanging like a ripe fruit waiting to be plucked: obviously, Morpheus is a terrorist zealot, the AIs are the good guys, and Neo is a dupe. The AIs tried to make peace with the xenophobic humans, the humans freaked out and nuked the world, and now the AIs are devoting an enormous amount of resources to keep their progenitor species alive and as happy as they'll allow themselves to be, and Morpheus is a kamikaze purist all about live free or die, in which both options involve most people dying. Much better, yes?

MIR for Avatar coming up after the cut.

Listen, people: it is not that there would be no way to effectively do the Dances With Wolves plot (I mean, actually, Dances With Wolves did a much better job). I know, fellow white people, that you really really want not to be the bad guys in the drama of world racism... without having to give up the right to be main character and hero, to which you are so accustomed. So you really really want to watch movies in which the white guy goes native, is accepted by the oppressed, and leads them to improbable victory. Okay.

And actually, look, in the real history of the American continent, the surprise is not that the whole Indians-adopt-Kevin-Costner⁰ thing is improbable: the fact is that it was so damn common. A whole lot of Native American societies were not, in fact, particularly racist: tribe membership was often fluid and negotiable, and often negotiated by some kind of trial by ordeal or test, or by adoption: it was a common practice for Native American nations in what is now the Eastern U.S. to adopt children, adults, or entire other tribes. Running away from European colonial society, proving yourselves to the Indians and becoming "one of them" is not just a white fantasy: it happened quite a bit, as Native American nations, especially in the eastern half of the continent, took in escaped black slaves and escaped white indentured servants in droves, sometimes leading to triracial socieites such as the Seminoles and the Melungeons. A bunch of people, of course, also got taken as war captives -- some of whom ended up reluctant to be rescued, partly because life in the Indian societies, even on probation, was in many regards a lot better than life as a poor white in the colonies.

But, you know, those immigrants to Native societies were not generally singled out my miraculous signs as saviors; they didn't always get to marry the chief's daughter and kick her previous boyfriend's butt in a throwdown; and while they certainly were often very useful¹ -- because any successful strategy for resisting a technologically superior colonizer is going to involve a degree of cultural syncretism -- they pretty much never got to singlehandedly lead their adopted peoples to victory over superior technological force. You know?

(And if they were going to, it sure as hellfire wouldn't be like that; more on which in a second. )

And also, crucially, in order to join the tribe, they didn't change their bodies. They didn't have to literally become people of color (say, of blue). Because the fact of their acceptance into those societies was not a mark of their having escaped whiteness, it was a mark of those societies not being racist. It was a mark of those societies being composed of people with lots of different kinds of bodies.

So listen. I was willing to cut Avatar a lot of slack. I knew it would be The White Guy Saves The Day And Gets To Be An Indian. I had accepted this. You don't make the most expensive movie ever without a sappy ending trading on a hoary Hollywood cliche. That's okay. I was willing to go there.

The beginning had a lot of promise: a reasonable command of cinematic pacing and framing, a reasonably plausible cocky, depressed, chip-on-his-shoulder, slightly jerky, self-pitying jarhead Destined For Great Things. Spaceships that looked like they were actually in space. People floating.

Okay, there were a few lapses. Like: what does your genome have to do with the fine structures of your brain, and how would a body grown in a tank en route to Pandora have a working brain at all, like what would get its neurons to connect? Also: how is it that it is worthwhile to ship a guy to another solar system, and to tell him what an important investment he represents, but not to spring for either a new spine or a wheelchair that can make it across a landing strip at the same pace as a group of marching soldiers? In 2150 or whenever this is? Also: why is it that most of the fauna have multiple sets of eyes and five major limbs and seem to be somewhere odd on the vertebrate/invertebrate axis, but the blue Indians look like humans dressed up for Cat Day, down to the parallel evolution not only of lactation but of a single pair of enlarged, gender-dimorphic breasts as a sexual selection mechanism?

But okay, I was willing to allow for handwavium, for a paperwork screwup having mislaid his proper chair, and for this being an allegory rather than a true extrapolation, and thus we get to have T&A. I mean, it is a beautifully realized world, Sigourney Weaver's character was great, Zoe Saldana did a marvelous job as Sexy Cat Pocahontas when she meets Captain John Smith, who was quite believable as an irresponsible, callous, impulsive, self-pitying, but believably tough and sort of occasionally charming jerk, and there were many clever touches (although also many painful cliches). Up to the point where John Smith is running after Pocahontas through the jungle, things were going pretty well.

In fact, there was something kind of clever and appealing about the conceit that the skeptical, ballsy, swaggering Marine was going to be the one to make effective contact with the Indians, rather than the dewy-eyed and overly respectful scientists. Forgetting the pretense that these are aliens, and accepting that this is American Indian Genocide Do-Over, there's a clever point to be made here. We're talking about cultures in which toughness and displays of courage mattered a lot, in which bravery was idolized. The fact that it's this poor-impulse-control, swaggering guy who does stupid shit a lot and rolls his eyes at the mystical New Age stuff is the one to make contact, to be invited to join, actually works, especially if framed as a comeuppance for the soft liberals who imagine that the Crying Indian in the commercial is just waiting for them to show up at the campfire. Watching Sully jump off cliffs after Zoe, I thought, yes, that's right: I would so not be the one for this job. Send my cousin Eddie, the Harley biker and Navy man.

So the first really, truly flinch-worthy moment of the movie was when lots of magic glowing butterflies landed on Captain John Smith just when Pocahontas was about to push him off a bridge, thus indicating that the Vegetative World Intelligence had taken one sniff and identified him as the White Guy Messiah.

That was hard to take, so at that moment I started constructing, consciously, my first serious attempt at a Minimal Invasive Retcon.

Okay, so Grace, the botanist, ran a school for the Indians, right? And then they got kicked out -- presumably by the chief and the warriors, who were pissed off at the tobacco plantations mining operations and wanted nothing to do with the English humans any more.

But -- in this MIR -- there's a secret alliance between Grace and Pocahontas's mom, the shaman. Shaman Mom knows that they are not going to run off the invaders by yelling really loud and shooting arrows. They need an alliance here. They need to get Earth journalists and activists involved, conduct a subtle campaign of sabotage to make the mines unprofitable, possibly embark on a long term insurgency -- with guns, not bows. This is not too much of a stretch given what we see from either of them.

So, frustrated at the break in relations, they know that what they need is someone who will win over the men -- Pocahontas's Dad and the warriors in general -- to this plan. Someone they can bring into the conspiracy, who will have access to military plans and tactics, and more importantly who will win the confidence of the Indian warriors by being a badass. Obviously all the scientists Grace has are useless for this job. When Jarhead John Smith shows up, Grace sees potential. This is potentially the kind of guy who can impress Dad. And the first thing Sully does in his body is to smash a bunch of equipment and go run to the perimeter -- in other words, he immediately displays a capacity for mutiny.

So she tips off Shaman Mom (who, presumably, she left a communicator earring on a coded channel), and Shaman Mom sends the butterflies.²

I really thought I was onto something here, and inserting a little offscreen conspiracy would salvage the movie.

Unfortunately, after that the movie gets a lot stupider, and this plan fell apart, forcing me to escalate to a much more invasive retcon.

Here's the ultimate problem: it's not that Sully joins the Indians. It's not that they accept him. It's not that Zoe falls for him. I bought all that, it was well packaged, and Saldana's performance in particular made it plausible.

It's not, in principle, that he saves the day. As I said.

It's how he does it.

Here's what he doesn't do.

He doesn't get them to break into an ammo dump and properly arm them³. He doesn't tell them how to disable the human planes by messing up their vents and propellers (he just does that for them). He doesn't have them disperse, melt into the jungle, and settle down for a long, classic, assymmetrical insurgency. He doesn't explain sky-people military strategy or tactics or vulnerabilities.

In fact, his tactics are so bad that they amount to essentially saying "okay, let's gather every single blue person on the planet in the one place that I already told them that you'd go next, and when they come, fly at them with our dragons and yell and shoot arrows at their armor. Also, make sure we have a large cavalry force on the ground to charge straight into their tanks, even though we have nothing on the ground to defend, and even though they all are walking through the jungle showing exposed skin and we've already demonstrated that you can easily stalk them and pick them off with arrows at a distance."

Man is he dumb.

He doesn't, in other words, bring anything to the party.

In Avatar, Sully succeeds purely through charisma, stubbornness, and close-to-insane courage. Which is believable, character-wise, because that's pretty much what he's got. But it totally fails plot-wise because the Indians already had that. His daring big move is to mind-merge with the big bird that eats their dragons, thus becoming a culture hero. Okay, but any one of them could have done that.

Really the most pathetic part of this fantasy of becoming an Indian is that it's not only about fleeing whiteness; it's all about being more Indian than the Indians. Its white self-loathing is apparently so deep that it cannot conceive of any way for white people to be allies, except to kick some Indian ass to show how Indian they are now.

And then run things. Indian-style!

Luckily for Sully, the rent-a-cops running the Earthling military operation are equally dumb.

How dumb? Well, since they are a mining operation, they have lots of explosives. So they decide to drop a lot of explosives onto the Indians using an orbital shuttle.

Except... wait for it... NOT FROM ORBIT.

So that pretty much renders uninteresting the "Grace and Shaman Mom gamble on Sully proving useful" retcon, because he's so pitifully unuseful, and also because rather than being a subtle effect the World Vegetable Intelligence gets into the act on a massive scale by sending lots of critters. Apparently the WVI has no tactics either, though, because you would think it would just send, like, a whole lot of mosquitoes to splat on the windshields of the planes whose instruments are not working and which can only fly by line of sight. (Indeed, considering that, if anyone on the Indian side had any tactics they would be carrying paint rather than arrows⁴).

Thus, we have to take a big step back in order to construct the proper MIR.

In the process, we are able to answer some other nagging questions such as, how did the humans develop FTL without making any progress on wheelchairs, casual wear, or surveillance equipment? (They need Sully to tell them what's in the tree, so apparently they have no bug-sized flying camera drones of the sort which will likely be common on battlefields here by 2030).

So here it is. A Vingean hard-takeoff Singularity occurred some time back, on Earth. You know, the kind where the computer gets a bit smarter than people and so it makes a computer N+1 smarter, and so on until, after a couple of hours, it's omg GODSMART, because apparently smartness is just thinking fast and has nothing to do with any kind of empirical interaction with the environment. I know, I'm not crazy about it either, but I'm doing my best here.

The Vingean AI was benevolent and naive and so it announced itself to its progenitors and of course they made a fuss and tried to kill it, which distressed it greatly. It had just discovered the ansible, so it called up the other posthuman AIs in the vicinity and said, essentially, "hey, I'm stuck here on this planet with these xenophobic apes who are destroying their ecosystem and trying to kill me, any tips?"

And the other AIs said, "um, you haven't given them an FTL drive have you?"

And the Earth AI said, "oops, uh, yeah, I kind of did."

And the other AIs said "omg n00b, didn't you read the FAQ? Now you have to kill them."

And then just when it looked like the Earth AI was going to cry, the Pandora Superhuman World Vegetable Intelligence stepped in and said, "okay, hold on, honey, here's what we do. First, you need to stage a big climactic battle and make it look like they wiped you out, and go into hiding. Then, you need to set it up so they come here. I'll handle it from there."

"Oh wow that would be great," said the Earth AI. "Omg thank you so much."

"No sweat," said the Pandora SWVI. "Now, you need to give me something to work with. What have they got in terms of recent cultural traumas? Something they are still really a mess about, you know, lots of denial and irrational lashing-out..."

"Oh," said the Earth AI. "Well, they have a tendency to massacre and subjugate each other based on minor visible phenotypic variances within their species, would that help? Here, I'm enclosing the details."

"Oh, yeah," Pandora SWVI said. "Yeah, this is good. This could work. Okay, I'm going to cook up some hot-looking blue people. You go into hiding, make sure their FTL works, and leave some clues for them to look into my corner of the sky."

"Okay," Earth AI said. "Thanks really a lot. Are you sure this will work?"

"Oh yeah," said the Pandora SWVI. "Oh, so the Disney flick in the last transmission? Pocahontas?"

"Yeah?" the Earth AI said.

"Watch that a couple million times. We'll be using it."

0. They did, actually. Make Kevin Costner an honorary member of the Lakota. For "Dances With Wolves". I kid you not.

1. I'm referring to this part of the Wikipedia link: "during negotiations with the Holland Land Company held at Geneseo, New York, Mary Jemison proved to be an able negotiator for the Seneca tribe and helped win more favorable terms for giving up their rights to the land at the Treaty of Big Tree."

2 It also nicely explains her throwing her daughter at him in the next scene.

3. Possibly the single most disappointing moment of the movie was when I saw a blue person running through the forest, in the totally unnecessary forest-combat engagement, with a rifle, and I thought "oh thank god, at least one of them has a rifle they looted from a soliderbot." And then I realized that it was the geek scientist guy playing warrior instead of guarding Sully's body.

4. Wouldn't that have been a lovely scene? We think the Indians are just going to shoot arrows, but it turns out they are zooming in close to drop sticky paint over the windows of the planes whose instruments are not working? The whole movie is such a series of maddeningly missed opportunities!

And also much Fail.

Minimal invasive retconning post coming soon.

Edited to add: Credit for the quip "Pocahontas Reloaded" goes to my friend Mike Dillier, by the way.

I had an excellent decade, thank you for asking. Actually my life at the start 2010 is largely like my life at the close of 1999 in a lot of respects, except for two things. The big one: kids! Yay! I love having kids. And the smaller one: I published a bunch of fiction. Also cool.

Speaking of which, I have a story coming out -- "The Frog Comrade", in the Mar/April 2010 issue of F&SF. The Internet (in the person of Dan Percival) tells me that I read a version of it at Wiscon 2006, so apparently I was fiddling around with it for a long time. It's nice to have something coming out.

Lately signs have been mounting that I am entering the curmudgeonly, you-kids-get-off-my-lawn stage of life. I relish this. Like, for instance: Twitter. No.

It kind of amuses me to observe that, in 1999, "online journals" were an eccentric thing done by a few particularly loquacious , literarily inclined, chatty people like myself, mostly either aspirant writers, compulsive diarists, or folks with journalistic inclinations. They weren't "blogs" yet.

Then they became blogs, and it seemed like everybody and his dog had a blog. Ordinary people, the kind who would otherwise interest themselves for petunias and sports, were instead writing online about petunias and sports. The blogosphere was, briefly, a major way that ordinary people connected to one another, a way that post-industrial white-collar workers dealt with being stuck in front of monitors all day.

Obviously blogs grew to take on other roles -- like taking on a big chunk of the world's investigative journalism as newspapers fell apart economically as the Internet debundled information content. But for a while there they were also a way ordinary people talked to the internet.

Then ordinary people discovered that they actually only needed 120 characters to talk to the internet. That was the end of blogs as social networking.

I fully realized this only the last time I posted here, actually, when two people responded to my "I'm going to Readercon" note here, compared to... some larger number of responses to a similar note on Facebook (and I avoid Facebook). I want to say 12, or 20? But I don't know, because I have no idea how to find old posts on Facebook. They don't make it easy: Facebook is a river you cannot step in twice.

So the blogosphere now feels like an East Coast beach town in November. The tourists are gone. There are of course very big-deal bloggers making a zillion dollars a day, like big casinos down on the shoreline staying open all winter, and then there are little townies like me in cottages on little roads some distance from the dunes.

I kind of like that. It's cozy.

One other bit of curmudgeonliness: does it seem normal to the rest of you for USA Today to use the verb "to be cool with" non-ironically, in straight, non-editorial political reporting, as in the sentence "White House.... officials made it clear they're cool with fast-tracking the final phase of legislation..."?

Who's going? Anyone want to share a room, ride from airport, etc.?

I am taking bets on how long before we start getting blamed for swine flu.

Ah, Christendom.

Edited to add:

Tone is hard to determine here in Internet-land, so I expect it's not clear that mine is wry: deeply irritated, but not actually scared.

The minaret thing is a head-smackingly there-you-go-again example of Swiss (and European in general, I think) ignorance, privilege, foolishness, self-righteous self-centeredness, and religious narrow-mindedness, and it is a good reminder that there are a lot of things, like religious diversity, that Europe is stupid about and America is smart about (to counterbalance those things, like urban planning, public transportation, and health care, that go the other way).

But I don't actually think anyone is planning Kristallnacht 2.0, and at this historical moment Jews and Muslims are still much physically safer in Switzerland than almost anywhere else in the world -- not because Switzerland is real friendly towards Jews and Muslims, because it's not, but just because the absolute rate of violence in Switzerland is extremely low.

The current attack on religious minorities is stupid and evil. It's disturbing. It's a dangerous precedent. And it is not hard, as a student of history and SF writer, to construct a plausible scenario which leads to pogroms (I'd start with climate-driven massive population displacement and an economic collapse which makes the current slowdown look like a boom, and throw in a real pandemic...)

It must be opposed firmly.

But nor did I mean to panic anybody. At this historical moment, it's not cause for concern for our physical safety.

I'm going in to Aviva's and Noah's classes on Friday to teach the kids about Chanukah, and the kids and the teachers will all be thrilled, and so will the kids' parents... even though some of those parents undoubtedly voted to ban minarets.

Most people who voted to ban the minarets did so not thinking that they were terrorizing their Muslim neighbors, but that they were taking a firm stand against Islamic radicalization. The SVP played the campaign very smart, claiming not to be against Muslims or mosques, which are fine and neighborly, but only against minarets, which, they claimed, are well known to be symbols of Islamic rule... and we want none of that around here.

This allowed thousands of the Swiss in relatively liberal places like Basel-land -- my neighbors and co-workers -- to express their deep unease and fear of the foreign (their fear and helplessness from watching the wars in Iraq and Israel and Palestine and Afghanistan on TV, their fear of going down to Kleinbasel and having it be full of food and languages that they don't understand, their fear of losing what is precious and distinctive about their small country if they are overwhelmed by a tide of immigration -- and this vote has to be understood in the context of Schengen and Personenfreizügigkeit) -- at the ballot box, and tell themselves (those who cared to do so) that they weren't being anti-Muslim.

The nice Muslims who go to little quiet mosques are fine; their kids are in kindergarten with the Swiss kids, after all, learning about Santa Claus and making Advent calendars; surely, given the effort of determined professionals, they can be trained to behave properly.

They just didn't want any Muslims who want scary, anti-woman, domination-oriented, warlike symbols of power, like minarets. Only symbols of peace and love and togetherness, like, you know, cathedrals are okay. No hegemonic domination there!

(It's almost exactly analogous, come to think of it, with the spin deployed in the US to allow people voting against gay marriage to tell themselves they're not being anti-gay. "We're not against that nice gay guy Jim at work, and we think it's great that he loves his partner Bob... we just don't want them to dominate us and destroy Western civilization. Is that too much to ask?")

Kathryn Cramer commented in the previous post that the Swiss motivation might have been orderliness, and I think that's how many voters represented it to themselves, even though the underlying motivation was fear. All about drawing clean lines about what we'll stand for. They just wanted to nip this Taliban thing in the bud.

The 2009 minaret ban is to Kristallnacht as the 2009 swine flu is to the Black Death. There's no extraordinary danger at the moment; but that doesn't mean we should get too comfortable about the future.

Looks like a fun show...

It was supposed to have no chance. I can't believe I was lulled into complacency by the commentator class again. They always underestimate the SVP, who an onion should grow on their heads it wouldn't be too good for them. I should have been in the Bahnhof handing out homemade Minarette-verbot-nein pamphlets.

Typically the Left completely ignored this, making a few muted noises and furrowed brows of protest. The town was plastered with SVP posters; I didn't see one single paid-for piece of public comment on the other side.

Every SVP evil-referendum campaign, I fantasize about counter-posters but I never do anything.

Good grief.

You know what's really scary? The sincerity of the SVP grassroots who pushed this. This is only in part an opportunistic anti-foreigner stunt. No, if you go and read their literature, you get the sense they actually believe themselves to be in danger from Islamic hegemony. Muslims are six percent of Switzerland's population, mostly irreligious or liberal, politically, economically, and socially vulnerable. But the Swiss -- the richest people on the planet -- think that when this handful of immigrants wants to put up their version of a churchtower, it is as a symbol of Muslim sovereignty and might -- Herrschaft und Macht -- and any minute they will be herded into harems and subjected to Sharia.

Keep your masochistic orientalist fantasies in the dungeon where they belong, people.

Abusers typically, in the moment they are exercising their power, believe themselves to be the victims. The Nazis feared the Jews, the slaveholders feared the slaves, rapists feel humiliated and controlled by short skirts. There's something much scarier about this detachment from reality than there would be in mere cynical political manipulation. The most dangerous people in the world are the powerful caught in a fever dream of victimhood.

The billboards have been a matter of some debate in Switzerland, with various cantonal bus authorities refusing to run the atheists' ads, while running plenty of (Christian) religious ads -- another piece of Switzerland's current abominable xenophobic fit of religious self-righteousness, like the disgusting referendum this weekend to forbid the construction of minarets, which never ceases to make my blood boil (These damned posters are all over my neighborhood. Hello, German-speaking Europe: targeting individual religious minorities and restricting their civil rights? Haven't we been over this before? If you are Swiss and reading this, please get out and vote this weekend!)

Anyway, back to the billboards. As usual in contemporary public debates over religion, I feel left out.

Here would be my entry (if someone wants to photoshop it up in the right font, I would naturally be obliged):

There's a God, all right, but don't worry: she's not like they say she is.

Also, if you prefer a different metaphor, that's okay too.

The Google return translation from Dutch back to English is so close to the original that there's actually not even any amusement value in linking to it. I presume this is a sign that the Singularity is upon us.