First They Razed the Minarets—

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

 Can you believe it? A bunch of foreign fanatics wants to desecrate our traditional skyline with toothpick towers they call minarets from which they’ll yodel I don't know how many times a day, and we’re supposed to sit by, mum as mice, while Switzerland becomes Switzerlost.  Minarets!  Impaling clouds!  Making a Swiss cheese of the heavens.  No way! No new minarets! As for those built already, down with every one of them!   If these terrorists-in-the-making don’t like it, well! we’ll sic the Swiss Guard on them.  A good Swiss pike can repel any raghead—and aren’t those puffy pants cute?

Wouldn't you know it!  The United Nations is in a snit, as if we were discriminating, not merely asserting our right to be Swiss.  So we’ll have to level the playing ground, it seems.  All steeples and bell towers will also have to go, which may be just as well.  Their upkeep, so to speak, is murder.  What’s sauce for the Muslim goose is sauce for the Christian gander, it seems.  Of course, the carillons and bell ringing are done for, too, which may not be so bad.  We’ll be able to sleep in on Sundays.  Anyhow no one needs bells or calls to prayer, for that matter, in the modern world.  We have watches.  Swiss watches.

Speaking of watches, the clock towers are doomed.  The economic levelers say it’s not fair to put timepieces on a pedestal if you can’t erect Swiss Army knife towers and that won’t do, according to the environmentalists.  A tall, sleek, gleaming blade, evidently, would have a genocidal impact on migrating geese and ganders.  Ditto the scissors and the corkscrew.  I’m tempted to use the tweezers to tweak certain noses, but there we are.

Ah, skyscrapers!  With all other towers razed, they make a grand silhouette against the sky.  But the Jungians are whining about the baleful psychological impact of all those Freudian phallic symbols.  Either we en-womb Basel, Geneva, Zürich and every cow-ridden village geodesically or they’ll be googling explosive formulas from Islamist websites.  Once upon a time—sigh!—we’d have dome-sticated fast.  But the U.S. has declared war on tax evaders, kleptocracy is under attack and the banks can’t mint money in the good old Swiss way. So ker-boom!  It’s cheaper to destroy than to build.

Flat is the new aesthetic, which, like flat beer, takes some getting used to.  Nevertheless, we are still very well fed (those geese) and enjoy our libations (accessed with those corkscrews), so we are very thankful (in our de-steepled churches).  And here’s a true blessing: we have gorgeous unobstructed views of the mountains all around us. No more pining for Alps in urban canyons.    

On the other hand, about those snow-covered peaks: given our subtle new aesthetic, they’re something of a vulgar overstatement—all those crags and cliffs looming over our tidy, unaspiring civilization.  But, no problem!  The American coal industry knows how to level mountains.  Maybe (like the Americans) we can get the job done before people realize what’s going to happen to picturesque little creeks and water quality, in general.  Not that the latter should hurt us, of course.  We guzzle beer. Or wine.

Meanwhile, the Maldives and other islets about to be drowned by global warming will be begging for help.  We’ll send them our mountains in supertanker loads—and if we wait long enough to make our move, they’ll pay through the snorkel for a bunch of rocks.  I nearly said something about not wanting to toot our Alpenhorn.  Better this now: we Swiss don’t like to brag.  But if we can sell holes in cheese, we can sell anything.  

Meanwhile, we have another project underway.  We’ve discovered that some houses are taller than others.  That won’t do—