That famous scene in 1984 when O’Brien holds up four fingers and tells Winston Smith, whose back is bent according to his “submission,” to believe that there are five fingers. Why? Because the state says there are, that’s why! So it is in a totalitarian state. Reality and truth are predetermined by those who control the present, because they control the past. A reprint of Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel lecture entitled “Art, Truth and Politics” exposes totalitarian foreign policy from the Cold War through the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. He unleashes the power of art to apprehend the “exploration of reality,” because, as he says, “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.”

It was once said that when government no longer works for the people, the people need to take government back! We the people of New York State need to stand up and say, “Enough!” We don’t need more taxes, we need to reduce government. In New York, we have 29 US Congress members and two US Senators, however, in our New York Assembly we have 150 members and 62 State Senators. Why? Why do we need that many elected officials? All it does is add more tax dollars needed. If we the people want our taxes to go down, then we must demand that we reduce government in New York State. Not just elected officials but all of government.

[Editor’s note: Due to an editing error, the first paragraph of a letter in last week's Artvoice from Kevin Yost of Henrietta was truncated. The entire letter, now including the missing portion appears below.]