Dear Marion,

When I write to ask that you accept my apologies for my apologies for
seeming patronizing, it's obvious that these apologies themselves in
turn, may - or will - seem patronizing and that from the appearance,
valid or otherwise, of patronizing there is no escape, and that
apologies therefore will necessarily be compounded much like the
value of an exponential equation. I will find myself apologizing for
apologizing ... for apologizing and so on, with no end in sight. 
Some facets of personality will resist the polish of politeness
and must remain rough. Apologizing for ones character is a recursive
function productive of no forgiveness. 

Implicitly, if not explicitly the fact that our correspondence
continues, entails an agreement to disagree. In the realm of politics,
this disagreement, as I understand it, may be summarized by your
Goethe-like premise, that fundamentally, the state is good, or more
directly, that the state is a reflection, however faint and distorted
of the Kingdom of God.  If you were a Jewess, your imagination would
seek with fervent longing - mit sehnsuechtigen Blicken - the
Jerusalem of old. As a spiritual daughter of the enlightenment, whose
prophets, rather than Jeremiah and Isaiah, are Thomas Jefferson and
Tom Paine, you look for salvation to the halls of Congress and the
chambers of the Supreme Court, admitting that they are not quite
perfect, but fervent in your belief that we're getting there, we
must be almost there, until finally, enebriated with a mixture of
hope and despair you proclaim to yourself and to any one who will
listen, on the election of the next Abraham Lincoln, the next Franklin
Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or the next Barack Obama: We've made it!
The millenium is here!

For better or for worse, as a scientist, as a professional biologist
and anthropologist, I can't permit myself to be swayed by sentimental
fantasies, no matter how noble. My purpose is to observe, without fear
or favor, how individuals, how groups and governments act, to chronicle
and to understand and to interpret their conduct. I want my study to
encompass the entire spectrum of human behavior from the apparently
most "saintly", Pope Benedict, to the most reviled and apparently most
"evil", Osama bin Laden himself. To my mind, Buchenwald and Guantanamo,
Auschwitz and Abu Ghraib are inextricably intertwined. To understand
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one must understand the bombing of Coventry
and London and Dresden and Braunschweig. To understand the execution
of Jesus one must understand the execution of the vilest criminal,
and vice versa. There is indeed much to be understood, so much in fact,
that perhaps we should not even try. It takes too much effort, and if
we ever got started, seriously to try to understand, we should not have
time, - or be too discouraged -,  to vote.

Which thought reminds me of Margrit, who, as you can imagine, was
evangelical in her efforts to persuade Margaret and myself to vote.
On several occasions Margrit intervened with the Registrar in Abingdon
to mail us absentee ballots; but in vain. Because the ballots permitted
absentee voting on only two conditions. It required one to state under
penalties of perjury either that one was absent on vacation or that one
was absent on business. The simple truth that we lived in Belmont part
of the year was not acceptable. Persons who simply live, as distinct
from vacationing or conducting business, are permitted to vote only at
the polling place to which they are registered. Inescapably, it would
have been perjury for me to state that I was in Belmont on vacation
or that I was in Belmont on business. O.K., Margrit would have said,
voting for the RIGHT candidate is very important. If you're voting for
the RIGHT candidate, a little perjury is acceptable.  In that case,
my reply, why not vote early and vote often. Wouldn't it have saved
the world much misery, wouldn't the lives of 12 million human beings
have been spared if in 1936, the good Germans who opposed Hitler had
voted so early and so often that Hitler would have lost the election? 
Surely for so noble a cause, it's o.k. to perjure yourself. I'm stumped.
You tell me. It's your turn. Tell me what's right and wrong.
Jochen