At The Auction Of The Ruby Slippers

There’s a pretty good chance that almost everyone is in some way familiar with eBay.  Whether you have bought things, sold things, or just browsed the website, you’re pretty familiar with the purpose of it.  eBay is a way for people to sell/buy items in a competitive manner which gives it a sense of risk.  For the sellers, they can either make bare minimum of what they are asking or they can make out huge if many people start bidding against each other.  The same applies to the buyers, they can either get an item for a lot cheaper than they could in a store or they could end up paying more than they hoped for if the item means that much to them or is considered rare.  When I think of eBay now, I think of the commercial where there are 4 or 5 regular people running down a football field.  They keep looking into the sky like they are competing to catch a football and score a touchdown.  They all jump into the air and when the camera goes to close-up of the catch, it is an urn or some kind of large vase that is fumbling around in their hands.  One man grabs hold of it and it then is tackled by another member of the group.  A woman then grabs the urn after he gets hit in end zone where she ends up scoring the “touchdown”, and then the words, “It’s Better When You Win It.” appear on the screen.

The story, At The Auction Of The Ruby Slippers by Salman Rushdie, is a satire about an auction where everyone is showing up to get a chance to buy the ruby slippers from The Wizard Of Oz.  The list of people that have shown up are: Movie stars, memorabilia junkies, Wizard OF Oz fanatics are there dressed up as characters from the movie, political refugees, exiles, displaced persons, and even homeless tramps are there just to get a look at the slippers. 

Everyone is at the auction to attempt to buy these ruby slippers.  I thought the reason everyone wanted them was because they are like a religious relic in a non-religious way.  I put it like that because in all actuality there is nothing religious about the slippers, but everyone holds them as some kind of relic like Christians would look at The Cross.  It is such a famous movie world-wide and everyone knows about the ruby slippers that Dorothy wore with their magical powers of clicking the hells together three times. But Rushdie says that, “We revere the ruby slippers because we believe they can make us invulnerable to witches; because of their powers of reverse metamorphosis, their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return; and because they shine like the footwear of the Gods. (92)”  

In addition to the slippers, tons of other things have been auctioned off in that very auction room including the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, the Alps, the Sphinx, wives, husbands, state secrets, human souls, and just about everything else.  Here Rushdie is making fun of humans and their desire to own the most “stuff”.  It’s not so much like this in all cultures, but certainly is in ours, that the more “things” you have, the wealthier and more regarded you are.  People are fascinated with material wealth and defining themselves with what they own rather than who they are as a person.

You can’t blame everyone for their obsessions with material things.  It’s the society we have grown up in and if you learn something or see something that everyone does while your growing up, there is a pretty good chance you’re going to have those same views.  We live in a world where we can buy now with our credit cards and pay for it sometime later, but the ‘buy now’ factor is pretty predominant throughout the U.S.  I can’t say I’m perfect because there are some things that catch my eye and I buy them on an impulse but I think that it’s not really about what we have that defines us as a person, but what we do and how we hold ourselves is.