Me and MY Shadow was done My Way as a Patriot
By :  William W. Bauser

Frank Sinatra has left us with memorable songs which can be said to depict the constructionist philosophy to which cognitivist are so prompt to declare along with what George Orwell declares in his writings.  In the song “Me & My Shadow,” Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.  sing the following lyrics:

“Like the wallpaper sticks to the wall
Like the seashore clings to the sea
Like you’ll never get rid of your shadow
Frank, you’ll never get rid of me

Let  all the others fight and fuss
Whatever happens, we’ve got us.

Me and my shadow
We’re closer than pages that stick in a book
We’re closer than ripples that play in a brook
Strolling down the avenue
Wherever you find him, you’ll find me, just look
Closer than a miser or the bloodhounds"

In the realm of this metaphor of oneness as the natural essence of identity, the mind-set of realism takes as an independent objective truth that the reality of this analogical experience lies in the natural laws of nature as a literal expression of an individual’s struggle for existence.  And, as with the meaning of this lyric, George Orwell needs to be seen not as just an outsider who criticizes the foibles of a global social perspective as being wrong, but as a conspicuous consumer who pursues prominent leisure not from the inside of the global struggle for being, but by throwing stones at a glass structure from the outside without any real purpose of making improvements to the struggle of mankind.  George Orwell doesn’t care about what is the problem, but just to split and divide society to gain his obvious freedom as it is without knowing what he is doing.

 Orwell tells us as much in his 1947 essay Why I Write.  In this essay, Orwell tells us that why he writes is for sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.  These motivations of Orwell’s writings are at the center of his message for society and can be noted in the following manner.  For Orwell, sheer egoism is the desire, volition, to appear clever and talked about by others without the need of principles or rules of argument in order that you get what you want in life without ever having to prove that you know what you are talking about, but by constant advertising of ones ownership of experiences as existential demonstrations of ones will.  In his own words in Why I Write, he states: “My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.  When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’  I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”2

This incivility of purpose against a changing society to which ones desires of success is perceived as being threatened by a status quo of a  mechanical inhuman inaction of a Christianity which had lost it’s idealistic roots of Agape and compassion can be seen in Orwell’s preservation of the Christian ideal of  the action of  Agape and compassion.  This action of brotherhood and fellow empathy can be seen as an example of an attempt at an indirect proof of validity in Orwell’s perception of how to succeed in life without really trying in his opening lines of his book Homage to Catalonia.  In these opening lines he expresses this ideal of brotherly love and compassion by stating:

“In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an   Italian militiaman standing in front of the officer’s table.  He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders.  His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over his eye.  He as standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at map which one of the officers had open on the table.  Something in his face deeply moved me.  It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw way his life for a friend—the kind efface you would expect in an Anarchist though as likely as not he was a Communist.  There were both candor and ferocity in it, also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed  superiors.  Obviously, he could not make head or tails of the map.  Obviously, he       regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat.  I hardly know why, but I  have seldom seen anyone—any man, I mean—to whom I have taken such an immediate liking….”

For Orwell, this apparent humanitarian approach towards his fellow mankind allowed Orwell to express himself as an existential critic of a period of time which he saw as denying him his natural opportunity to success.  Those events that developed  which affected the status of humanity the most can be seen as both the “Wall Street Crash of 1929” and the “National Coalition Government of 1931” which was formed to find a way out of the crisis which the Wall Street Crash caused.  And, the image which is portrayed by Orwell here is one of  “Middle-Class Unemployment.”

The second reason that Orwell tells us in his Why I Write is aesthetic enthusiasm.  Aesthetic enthusiasm is portrayed by Orwell as a perception of natural beauty in the external world, or in the affective organization of images for a specific purpose.  And, in tradition of the empiricist were experiences having an eternal reoccurrence; the aesthetic image presented here is one that “money is the root of all evil, and mankind needs his roots.”  The point of the economic crisis was that the distance between the haves and those who do not have had increased, and all the intellectual theories that were developed had not but an abstract and not a practical answer to the problem.  And, it is the image of the praxis of the individual struggling against the institutional structure of the economic system that is the affect of the natural beauty of brotherly love and compassion as Veblen’s conspicuous consumer.  This image can be portrayed from Orwell’s text Keep Aspidistra Flying.  The image presented here is not one of utilitarian result oriented effect, but a dialectical material affective status of the historical situation.  In this text Orwell states:

“The mistake you make, don’t you see, is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself.  After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money?  You’re trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system.  But, one can’t.  One’s got to change the system or one changes nothing.  One can’t put things right in a hole-and-corner way, if  you take my meaning.”

This last quote takes us to the third reason of Why I Write.  Orwell tells us that “Historical impulse is the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”  The historical situation which can be seen when Orwell was writing was the age of protest of mankind against its own alienation from the industrial development and consumption. And, it is this estrangement from mankind’s praxis as a historical natural process to which the philosophy of dialectical materialism appears, and to which Orwell attends his message.  And, to this, Orwell can have been noticed as stating a moral that one cannot change human nature, because human nature is materialized in the experiences of what mankind materially accomplishes. And, the image to which Orwell exemplifies in his work Animal Farm is the corruption of  the historical principle of praxis by the political issue of personal expediency.  In the book Animal Farm he writes the following;

“But everyone worked according to his capacity.  The hens and ducks, for instance, saved five bushels of corn at the harvest by  gathering up the stray grains.  Nobody stole, nobody grumbled over his rations The quarrelling and biting and jealousy which had been normal features of life in the old days had almost disappeared.  Nobody shirked-or almost nobody.   Mollie, it was true, was not good at getting up in the mornings, and, had a way of  leaving work early on the ground that there was a stone in her hoof.  And the behavior of the cat was some what peculiar.  It was soon noticed that when there  was work to be done the cat could never be found.  She would vanish for hours on end and then reappear at meal-time, or in the evening after work was over, as though nothing had happened.  But she always made such excellent excuses, and  purred so affectionately, that it was impossible not to believe in her good intentions.  Old Benjamin, the donkey, seemed quite unchanged since the Rebellion.  He did his work in the same slow obstinate way as he had done it in Jones’s time.  Never shirking and never volunteering for extra work either.  About The Rebellion and its results he would express no opinion.  When asked whether He was not happier now that Jones was gone, he would say only ‘Donkeys live a long time.  None of you has ever seen a dead donkey,’ and the others had to be content with this cryptic answer.”

Finally, the above corruption of expediency can be realized as a materialistic metaphysic of experience whereby, in realizing the last purpose of Why I Write of a political purpose lies not just in raising and altering the consciousness of others to particular idea, but in the dogmatic assertion of the principle of  expediency.  For Orwell, any utopian ideal world was not a reality or fiction of politics.  As Fortunati points out; 4

“Everything is utopia, everything is project and fiction, contrast is lost.  The projected reality has engulfed and entirely swallowed up reality.” Consequently, the ideal world cannot exist because there are no parts to take into consideration for political endeavors.  However, what the hope of dialectical materialism to have the praxis of mankind become the cure for the enslavement of the institutionalization of mankind can be seen as a cruel hoax portrayed upon mankind whereby all experiences are to be had as material practices of how mankind does his work in principle.  Consequently, any push for a particular way of political living is seen as a dogmatic statement of what a particular group of persons demand as a way of life.  And, if there is an opposition, this dogmatic perception of political truth need be defended patriotically with an all out incivility to maintain the material principle of expediency.

Works Cited

http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/0.html

http://www.whitewold.newcastle,edu.au/words/authors/0/Orwellgeorge/prose/Keep AspidistraFlying/10.html

Orwell, George. Why I Write

Orwell, George. Animal Farm

George Orwell. (1987). Edited by Harold Bloom. NY,NY: Chelsea House Publishers

Rai, Alok. (1988). Orwell and the politics of despair. NY,NY: Cambridge University Press