Dear Marion,

The enthusiastic invocations with which your letters to me begin, 
remind me of the fanfares with which the composers of the Baroque
introduce their celebratory compositions. I think of the the Royal
Fireworks Suite, or the Gloria in Excelsis from the B minor Mass,
the Sinfonia that introduces Cantata No. 31, "Der Himmel lacht, die
Erde jubilieret," or "Unser Mund sei voll Lachens." No. 110.
I lack the mirror with which to reflect your encomiums onto your
own writing to which they surely apply equally if not more.

Your surmise that I have writing to get done, more significant than the
composition of letters, is not quite to the point. In the course of a
lifetime, I think I've discovered that the most meaningful speech is
as Plato demonstrated, the dialogue, its words addressed specifically
to another person, as distinct from the soliloqui in the closet or the
oration in the marketplace. Likewise, the writing that means the most to
myself and to the potential reader is not the published essay, not the
public thesis or the political manifesto, but the letter addressed to a
single correspondent.  Even ostensibly impersonal prose (or poetry) is
composed in search of a reader, perhaps only a single one, hiin enkelte,
such as Kierkegaard had in mind when he wrote his many books, which he
paid to have published and which had no buyers, and until long after
his death, no readers.

For many years, I shared your assumption that basically the government
does things right, that, with respect to the US Postal Service,
"Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays
these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
(Herodotus), that our courts dispense "equal justice under the law,"
that our army defends us from foreign enemies, and that our police
protects us from one another; in short, that the government is good
and does good things.

I remember, as a four or five year old child, being afraid of the
"Schupo" (Schutzpolizei) and running away from him, when I saw one appear
auf der Wendenstrasse.  One night my father left his car on the street
without displaying its parking lights. A policeman was sent to deliver
the summons.  He rang the door-bell like any other patient, but when
Margrit and I saw his uniform, we were terrified, sure that he would take
our father away. We broke down in tears, and so, according to my mother,
did the policeman. Her exegesis: "Das gute deutsche Volk." In Konnarock
I learned that when a black man is beaten up by a white man and calls
the sheriff to obtain protection, - not to speak of justice, - the
black man is arrested and charged with assaulting the white man, or
at minimum, charged with disturbing the peace. I'd never finish this
letter if I continued reciting examples. But to bring the topic up
to date:

I've submitted to the Massachusetts Appeals Court or, if they want
the case, to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, an impromptu
synopsis of Massachusetts justice, consisting a) with respect to
the Town of Nantucket: of i) fabricated evidence, ii) falsified Board
of Selectmen minutes, iii) forged electronic records of a Board of
Selectmen meeting; b) with respect to Nantucket Superior Court
protection of the foregoing (criminal) behavior with a grant of
defacto sovereign immunity; c) with respect to the Board of State
Examiners of Plumbers and Gasfitters: of i) fabrication of evidence
in order to try to conceal ii) gross violations of regulatory statutes
and regulations concerning the conduct of adjudicatory hearings;
d) with respect to Justice Macdonald of Suffolk Superior Court: 
the ignoring of his own records, - which is the polite and judicially 
acceptable way of saying that Judge Macdonald lied and falsified 
in order to reach the decision he deemed politically expedient. 
If they still had gallows on the Boston Common, that's where they 
would hang me; and in the contemporary climate, I have no way of 
predicting how they will punish me. I'll let you know when it happens. 

I interpret issues of whether the government can be trusted as
a subset of the question whether God can be trusted, i.e. whether
God is (always) good, and if not, why not. The classical question of
theodicee: the justification of God. In our Jewish tradition it's
all Eve's fault, and if not hers, then the serpent's which persuaded
her to eat and to offer to Adam the forbidden apple from the tree
of knowledge. The Greek gods also say "it's not our fault." The 
relevant sections of the Odyssey are worth reviewing:

_   Now all the rest, as many as fled from sheer destruction,
_   were at home, and had escaped both war and sea, but
_   Odysseus only, craving for his wife and for his homeward
_   path, the lady nymph Calypso held, that fair goddess, in
_   her hollow caves, longing to have him for her lord. But
_   when now the year had come in the courses of the seasons,
_   wherein the gods had ordained that he should return home to
_   Ithaca, not even there was he quit of labours, not even
_   among his own; but all the gods had pity on him save
_   Poseidon, who raged continually against godlike Odysseus,
_   till he came to his own country. Howbeit Poseidon had now
_   departed for the distant Ethiopians, the Ethiopians that
_   are sundered in twain, the uttermost of men, abiding some
_   where Hyperion sinks and some where he rises.  There he
_   looked to receive his hecatomb of bulls and rams, there he
_   made merry sitting at the feast, but the other gods were
_   gathered in the halls of Olympian Zeus. Then among them the
_   father of gods and men began to speak, for he bethought him
_   in his heart of noble Aegisthus, whom the son of Agamemnon,
_   far-famed Orestes, slew. Thinking upon him he spake out
_   among the Immortals:
_   _
=>  'Lo you now, how vainly mortal men do blame the gods! For
=>  of us they say comes evil, whereas they even of themselves,
=>  through the blindness of their own hearts, have sorrows
=>  beyond that which is ordained. Even as of late Aegisthus,
_   beyond that which was ordained, took to him the wedded wife
_   of the son of Atreus, and killed her lord on his return,
_   and that with sheer doom before his eyes, since we had
_   warned him by the embassy of Hermes the keen-sighted, the
_   slayer of Argos, that he should neither kill the man, nor
_   woo his wife. For the son of Atreus shall be avenged at the
_   hand of Orestes, so soon as he shall come to man's estate
_   and long for his own country. So spake Hermes, yet he
_   prevailed not on the heart of Aegisthus, for all his good
_   will; but now hath he paid one price for all.'
_   _
_   And the goddess, grey-eyed Athene, answered him, saying: 'O
_   father, our father Cronides, throned in the highest; that
_   man assuredly lies in a death that is his due; so perish
_   likewise all who work such deeds! But my heart is rent for
_   wise Odysseus, that hapless one, who far from his friends
_   this long while suffereth affliction in a seagirt isle,
_   where is the navel of the sea, a woodland isle, and therein
_   a goddess hath her habitation, the daughter of the wizard
_   Atlas, who knows the depths of every sea, and himself
_   upholds the tall pillars which keep earth and sky asunder.
_   His daughter it is that holds the hapless man in sorrow:
_   and ever with soft and guileful tales she is wooing him to
_   forgetfulness of Ithaca. But Odysseus yearning to see if it
_   were but the smoke leap upwards from his own land, hath a
_   desire to die. As for thee, thine heart regardeth it not at
_   all, Olympian! What! did not Odysseus by the ships of the
_   Argives make thee free offering of sacrifice in the wide
_   Trojan land? Wherefore wast thou then so wroth with him, O
_   Zeus?'
_   _                              Odyssey, Book I

I ask that you forgive my trespass on your profession if I try
to argue that the question whether government is essentially good
and only accidentally bad, or whether government is essentially
bad and only accidentally good, is a question of zoology, or 
if you prefer, meta-zoology. By way of essential digression,
let me say that I consider the original mistake (sin) not the
illicit acquisition of knowledge, but the misconception that men
and women are creatures other than and distinct from animals.
This denial of our animal natures is an insuperable obstacle to
our obtaining a better understanding of ourselves. If it persuaded
Adam and Eve of the conclusion that they are better than and
wholly unlike the other animals, the tree of knowledge is not
worth its name.

It seems obvious to me that the language, the words and the
concepts that represent our knowledge are synthezised by us 
from experience. The (mathematical) continuity and smoothness
of a line is synthesized by our brains (retinas) from a set
of proximately located points; our experience of motion is
derived from a series rapidly recurring and progressively
changing images. Our representation (Vorstellung) of the
world in which we live, the woods and the fields, the plains
and the mountains, the villages and the cities, are all of
them, similarly synthetic conceptions, notions assembled
by our brains from separate impressions, from sequential,
isolated images. It's natural for us to be terrified of what
threatens to destroy, and to be gratified by what promises
to protect and to nourish us.  Hence we are predisposed to
perceive our parents, protective of us as they are, as
wonderful people, etwas Besonderes, and likewise dependent
as we are on them, our governments to be wonderful institutions.
Our dependency on government makes is natural and indeed
necessary for us to trust government. It's as simple as that.

If we're humble and satisfied to remain relatively poor and 
downtrodden, then trusting in government is sufficient.
It's when we're no longer willing to accept our station in
life, when we become ambitious and uppity, that we become
critical of government, that we decide it no longer functions
exclusively in our favor, we begin to question, and sometimes
to challenge it.  When I reflect on my existence in the public
realm, I often feel as if I were living not in society, but in its
interstices. Distrusting government, it seems to me, is a natural
reaction and is entirely compatible to coexisting with it.

Idealization, furthermore, must be understood as a fundamental
human intellectual function. We idealize sequences of points as
lines, we idealize circles, triangles as the most elementary of a
host of geometrical - and mathematical constructions; our notions
of woods and fields, of plains and mountains, of villages and cities,
are all of them idealizations. We idealize our families, our
countries, - and ourselves. Our natural propensity for creating
images, ideals, is the source of the power and persuasiveness
of Plato's philosophy. It is the power which the ideal exercises
over our thinking that makes us want very badly to postulate its
goodness, including the goodness of the government, and which caused
Goethe to stigmatize Mephistopheles as der Geist der stets verneint.

Aristotle, as I interpret his writings, makes a beginning of
dismantling Plato's fantasy world - Maerchenwelt - explicitly
dethroning Plato's absolute virtue, absolute truth and beauty,
and replacing it with a dialectical "golden mean", a compromise
between extremes. Yet in the process of discarding Plato's fairy tales,
Aristotle resorts, albeit surreptitiously, to a different ideal, insofar
as he attributes to the words which he employs, unambiguous, consistent
idealized meanings, and then uses these words to construct the various
edifices of ethics, politics, physics and metaphysics of which
his writings consist. Even today, we are still haunted by Platonic
ideals; the process of de-idealization still has a way to go.

My preliminary deconstruction interprets government as an exercise
and exhibition of power on the part of the officials that constitute
it. The justice that is dispensed by the courts is that interpretation
of the law which creates and secures the power of the judges. Over the
years, I have proceeded on the premise that ultimately, the courts will
sustain no ruling that subverts their authority. In my present case, I
believe that Justice Macdonald ruled against me because he was
unsure of himself and of his grasp of the law, and therefore he
identified with, and adjudicated in favor of the Town of Nantucket
whose legal position was gravely deficient, but whose judicial
existence depended, as did his own, on the wielding of judicial
authority, even if that authority had to be exercised to unlawful
purposes. I'm proceeding on the assumption that the Appeals Court
or the Supreme Judicial Court will not feel theatened in the same
way, will not deem the exercise of authority to be an end in itself,
and will consider their own powers, which derive from law, to be
diminished rather than enhanced if they countenance an unlawful
decision by the lower court.  We shall see, and I shall report to you.

More about Theses on Health care reform in another letter.

Jochen