Swiss Citizen Since 1978

Then Michele Bachmann looked around and discovered that her friends at the Tea Party weren't as enthusiastic as she was about her being a conscious agent of a foreign power; that is to say, that by virtue of her marriage to Marcus, of Swiss descent, that she held dual citizenship, there and here.

"How," her Tea Sipping friends wanted to know, "is it possible to be a loyal American and go to church picnics and pledge the allegiance to the Stars and Stripes if you came from somewhere else?"

"But I didn't!", she protested, "Marcus' family came from there! We are just going along for the ride!"

But no amount of protesting that her real name was something else, and that she really loved Jesus and Our Founding Fathers much more than she loved Marcus or Switzerland and universal health care, mattered. Finally, she recanted being a citizen of the world, and went back into her house in Stillwater, Minnesota, which is not in her congressional district, anymore, either, just like Switzerland isn't.

And how well are the Swiss handling this incredible renunciation of all their works and ways?

Pretty well, given that most of them do not hold dual citizenship, either.

"That's how life goes!", Martin Kilian wrote for Tages Anzeiger. "One day you're Swiss, and the next you'd rather not be."

The general attitude in Switzerland toward what can only be understood as a massive failure in foreign relations and banking regulations seems to be:

"I think we'll get over it."

"I want to make it perfectly clear: I was born in America and I am a proud American citizen."

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