Desires Plagued by Materialism

Every little kid has been asked at one point ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ or better yet ‘who do you want to be?’  From a very young age we were all posed with this question, and we go on to live our lives hoping to discover what or who it is we want to become.  Along with being driven to not only figure what we will be, we are also infected with this idea of materialism, and how the person you are, is driven by your material value.  In Salman Rushdie’s East,West, the story At the Auctions of the Ruby Slippers, we find ourselves in a situation where the opportunity to purchase your greatest desire is up for sale.

The ruby slippers represent your greatest desire, the thing you want the most, “this is the courtroom of demand” (99).  It seems like these days an items price drives the desire for the product.  For many the product of the ruby slippers is this idea of ‘home’.  How is it possible to put a price on home?  Especially when “‘Home’ has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails” (93).   To remember home is to reminisce to a time where you were free of worry and oblivious to the harsh truths of the current materialistic society.   This idea of ‘home’ has a high value derived from everyone’s past of a once innocent nature, sheltered from materialism.  Although everyone wants to return home to achieve this life free of judgment, they continue to fall harder into claws of materialism, because here they are being forced to put a price on their greatest desire, and evaluate the true purpose in their bidding. 

The courtroom is filled with auctioneers and bidders, and although Rushdie comes up with fancy names for the segments such as witches, tin men, scarecrows, toto’s, and lions to name a few (89), he is in more simple terms referring to the Media as the auctioneers, and society as the bidders.  The auctioneers (aka the media) have he power to put a price on anything and test the drive of the materialistic bidders.  Rushdie pokes fun at the American materialistic society by putting national landmarks and other extravagant things up for sale such as the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, the Alps, the Sphinx, and State Secrets (98).  But realistically I question how far this is off from the honest truth?  I have to say not far at all, in this day and age we see people constantly striving to be at the front of the materialism race buying Lips like Angelina’s or purchasing a mail order bride, just to fit into the society we have created today.

For everyone these ruby slippers may represent something a little different, as no one person’s greatest desire is alike.  The media creates this picture of a certain standard that is acceptable for living and “in fiction’s grip, we may mortgage our homes, sell our children, to have whatever it is we crave” (102).  It is hard and sad to see that society has fallen into such a black hole of materialism, craving and desiring things that aren’t essential for the primary means of living.  I feel true happiness is appreciating what you have because then there would be no element of desire fueling this wretched materialism and everyone’s quest to become someone.  I believe Rushdie sums it up to a T so I would like to end with his quote, “Thanks to the infinite bounty of the Auctioneers[media], any of us, cat, dog, man, woman, child, can be a blue-blood; can be-as we long to be; and as cowering in our shelters, we fear we are not –somebody(103).