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In “State of the Union, 2004,” Vidal wrote, “Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

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Just because you can squeeze tenuous meaning out of a symbol, a gesture, a word, a sentence, a picture or a grunt does not mean that the meaning is absolute. If meaning were absolute in a piece of art, it ceases to have a necessary element of art. It does not give a person the chance to decide for themselves.