I am cleaning my desk of many miscellaneous scraps of papers, some over ten years old. One intriguing one is a photocopy of two pages from "The True Game" by Sheri S. Tepper. I don't think it is buried in our bookshelves, and it is not in the Duluth Public Library. It is at the Hennepin County Library, and so I must have borrowed it between 1996 when it was published and 1999 when we moved to Duluth.
The paragraph that I bracketed is:
"We are going to try to do what Windlow would have wanted," he said. "He told us that nations of men fell into disorder, so nations of law were set up instead. He told us that nations of law then forgot justice and let the law become a Game, a Game in which the moves and the winning were more important than truth. He told us to seek justice rather than the Game. It was the laws, the rules which made Gaming. It was Gaming that made injustice. We can only try something new and hope that it is better."
How true! One only need read the novels of John Lescroart or look at the work of the sausage factory called Congress to see how people game the system and ignore justice.
