Populism and Auctions

America is considered the freest country in the world because of our citizens' individual rights and liberties.  This freedom has unleashed unfathomable productivity the likes of which history has never seen.  All of this productivity has come at a very expensive cost, however.  Salman Rushdie adapts L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz" in his short story "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers" to show how once people prize possessions as a way to actualize themselves, they lose their home. 

It’s interesting that Rushdie uses Dorothy’s red shoes in the first place.  The moral of “The Wizard of Oz” is to believe in yourself, to rely on yourself, to trust yourself to make and return to your home; Rushdie’s story shows how using things to build reliance and trust can erode and indeed destroy our “home”. 

The narrator of Rushdie’s story attends the auction to buy the shoes, so as to requite his lost love of Gale, who also happens to be his cousin.  The shoes are just one of any imaginable things one can purchase at this auction; human souls are even for sale (a joke that would later realize itself in the advent of eBay).  Gale is saddened that a condemned alien will die because of isolation on Mars.  The alien sings songs in desperation from “The Wizard of Oz”, thus making the connection between the shoes and reclaiming an old lover.  The narrator has an epiphany, however.  He decides after bidding ever increasingly to abandon the race.  He disdains using money as a point system to judge value in people, and he feels ultimately relieved of this burden. 

Rushdie personifies the West as the Auctioneer.  It appears that he uses the idea of hegemony by the U.S. and its post WWII allies to conceptualize this seemingly eschatological view of a free-market system.  The Auctioneer uses carrots and sticks to lead its people, and I would suppose Rushdie argues the same happens with Western governments in leading their peoples.  This flow of Rushdie’s artistic development makes sense as he acclimated to a new Western lifestyle while living under fatwa, following his satire of Eastern lifestyle with his novel The Satanic Verses.

This short story, like most of Rushdie’s stories, is multilayered.  He uses many different analogies, parallels, and other devices to push members of one ideology to examine themselves.  “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” shows us Westerners a glimpse of our future should it continue to depend on consuming.  The close relation between environmentalist Annie Leonard’s immaterialism and sustainability agenda and Rushdie’s pointed focus provides us with both a humorous yet bleak analysis of what we are destined to become, should we choose to continue our current course of action.