the auction of your life

                Money means everything, at least that’s how everything plays. We usually buys something hoping that the product that we bought will being us something else. The computer I am using now, I bought it so it can bring me into the World Wide Web. The Xbox 360 I bought last year is for the over-rated Halo 3, which I have traded. The pair Michael Jordan shoe I bought 3 years back is for when I play basketball. Can I say these products will be use the same purpose? Others may have bought their computer for business usage, the Xbox 360 may be used for DVD and games by others and the pair of MJ shoe is just probably for show.

                In “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers”, a short story by Salman Rushdie, is about a pair of slippers which every bidders have its own purpose for wanting it. “Wizards, Lions, Scarecrows are in plentiful supply…there is a scarcity of Tin Men” (Rushdie 89). This list of names conclude that the ruby slipper is the actually slipper from The Wizard of Oz. Windy is the girl who wore the slipper which protects her until she reach her destination. The bidders, however, have different uses for the slipper. The slippers, in a sense, “promised to take us home” (Rushdie 93). The pair is valuable because some “revere the ruby slippers because we believe they can make us invulnerable to witches” (Rushdie 92). Others see it as a time traveling machine “hoping that the ruby slippers might transport them back through time as well as space…to be reunited with their deceased parents” (Rushdie 93). The word home is too equivocal. “Home has become such a scattered, damaged various concept in our present travails” (Rushdie 93). It is too vague which cause all the commotion of all type of bidders. For the weak and suffering, home can be physical or intangible. We have Gale, who the narrator hopes to win her love back by winning the slippers as a gift to her. To him, being with her is his home.

                Everyone is welcome to the auction. “Movie stars are here…bringing their glossy, spangled auras to the saleroom” (Rushdie 88). Behaviorist philosophers and quantum scientists crowd around the magic shoes. Exiles, homeless, political refugees and “children from nineteenth-century Australian paintings are here” (Rushdie 94). The narrator even “notices the frail figure of an alien creature with an illuminated fingertip” (Rushdie 94). This auction is neither reality nor a dream. Everything you ever heard of is at the auction bidding for the slippers. The only people that are not bidding are the SWAT and security dogs and auctioneers. They are the corporation, organizer, provider of the demand.

The illuminating fingertip!!!

                Before the slippers, there have been others valuable item that has been auctioned. “in the Grand Saleroom, in recent years, we have witnessed the auction of the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, the Alps, the Sphinx” (Rushdie 98). While those are monumental, the Auctioneers have auctioned “smoldering red demons, of a wide selection of human souls of all classes, qualities, ages, races and creeds” (Rushdie 98).

                Can we really label the item listed above as consumer’s products? To me, if there is a supply with demand for it, it is consider consumer’s products. Annie Leonard presents an argument to this use of “material economy”. She argues that we live in a “linear system on a finite planet”. We go through the process of extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal. I completely agree that Annie’s nightmare of a dying planet to “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers”. Consumers/Bidders are buying everything they can afford provided by major corporation/Auctioneer. So when we “think” we need to buy a demon or soul, to Annie, it’s like we are buying away our planet.

You can watch Annie's movie at http://www.storyofstuff.com/