IrwinBFriedman
As a tribute to George Orwell, this little story looks at how different things could have been if only the animals had believed in the seven noble ideals:
• Fighting the just war
• Democracy, equality & fraternity
• Progress and enlightenment
• Justice always triumphs
• Nothing but the truth
• Viva free enterprise
• Never lose faith
Irwin Friedman wrote this story in 1971 when he was twenty-one years old. He was studying medicine, immersed in the insanity of the Apartheid world of South Africa at the time. The government of the day was becoming become increasingly schizophrenic. The story lay dormant as a ‘manuscript in the drawer’, its angry ending, which has been edited out, was a launch pad for his own personal brand of existentialism. In 1984 he re-wrote and edited it on his Radio Shack TRS 80 personal microcomputer as a tribute to the ‘world-gone-mad’ predictions of George Orwell. In 1996 after the miraculous transition of South Africa in the democratic elections of 1994, he re-edited it on his IBM PC. In 1998 he printed two copies. Finally in 2008 it has come out of the drawer. Why? The world is so different, but has anything changed?
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which...."
George Orwell, February 1944
"A dog looks up to a man as his noble master. A cat looks down because she can't be bothered. But only a pig can look a man in the eye and see his equal."
Adapted from a quote attributed to Winston Churchill.
"Lives of great men serve to remind us,
We can live like beasts or swine,
And in departing leave behind us,
Hoof prints on the sands of time."
Adapted by the author from a ‘Psalm of Life’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow