Final Thought on the Hot Topic of Globalization

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“Golly wallstreet you must be reading something in that piece of liberal communist loving tripe” JR

In class we got a demonstration of the binary relationship of ‘love it or leave it’ with the hot topic of globalization. The above quote was in response to my comment on a fellow student’s blog article on globalization. While I do believe that globalization is overall good for the economy I also do know that a lot of the topics that she did cover were very real in the issue of globalization. While this student was on the ‘leave it’ side of globalization we have the very apparent opposite of ‘JR’ who is defiantly on the ‘love it’ side of globalization. While he makes absolutely no valid arguments on globalization, we can see a good example of the simplistic ‘love it or leave it’ binaries of globalization. What we should as an economy and as a nation should achieve is to transcend from this binary relationship.

I believe that I have transcended myself already where I do believe that globalization is a good for our economy and that we should not move into an isolationist society. Then there is the humanitarian side of me, where I also do feel for the people that are in the ‘third world’ countries that are vastly underpaid and overworked.

Throughout the semester we got a firsthand look on how the various authors Ishiguro, Head, Mukherjee, and Rushdie; where all able to overcome these simplistic binaries. They illustrated ways to inhabit the world and transcend from those simplistic binaries. When speaking in terms on globalization, these authors in essence where able to illustrate to their readers on how to transcend from the simplistic binary of ‘love it or hate it’ to one that is unique to each reader himself/herself. In particular it was the books, Jasmine by Mukherjee and East, West by Salman Rushdie that epitomized this movement through their books.

First off we have Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee; in this book we have our main character, Jasmine, who grew up in a village in India, and moved to a small town in Iowa where she met and married her American husband, Bud Ripplemeyer. From the beginning in her small village of Hasnapur, she had the mindset of a small Indian village, where it was common for the women to have their husbands chosen by their mother and father.  In the beginning Jasmine was on the one side of the spectrum, where her Indian heritage played a main role in how she acted, talked, etc. When Jasmine came to the United States she was dumbfounded by the culture shock, in how Americans acted, talked, etc and she was confronted on leaving her Indian heritage to the American way of thinking which was on the other side of the spectrum.

Jasmine was torn between the two worlds of her Indian culture and the American culture which she do desperately wanted to become more apart. Jasmine was tired of the stereotypical thoughts that they had toward her where “she could not go any meal without cooking some Indian cuisine”. This came at a cost where she wanted to become too Americanized and she began to lose her cultural heritage. But, through the work of friends, family and lovers she was able to overcome these objections of the simplistic binaries of either ‘love it or leave it’ and she became a well rounded Indian American where she was able to attain some of her cultural heritage and some of the American heritage too.

In the book East, West by Salman Rushdie, there is a collection of short stories in which there is one called The Prophets Hair. In this we can see that the main character’s also face the simplistic binary that Jasmine faced, but in their case it was not about their own cultural heritage this one is about a more materialistic item, the coveted ‘vial of the Prophet Muhammad’s hair’. This vial is largely considered to be priceless, which was found by the narrator’s father, Hashim. Instead of doing his civic duty of returning the vial to the proper owner he decided to keep the vial for himself. This seemingly mild act has tragic consequences on the family at large. Hashim soon becomes enraged with greed over the possession of the sacred object and protects it at all costs, even the lively hood of his own family. He represents the ‘love it’ side of this example of the simplistic binary. His daughter, Huma, the narrator is on the ‘leave it’ side of the binary because this item is destroying the fabric of their family in just a short amount of time.

Hashim’s response to the hair shows that some people are willing ‘at all costs’ to get what they want (Rushdie, 50). Tragically the only way to get the father from his ‘love it’ side of the simplistic binary was for the attempted robbery of the vial, which ultimately lead to Hashim accidently killing his own daughter. The vial was soon returned to its rightful owners and was met by ‘the valley’s holiest men’ (Rushdie, 57), where it still stands today, in a secured room. The way that Salman Rushdie was able to overcome this ‘love it or leave it’ binary was that in some instances, the wealth of some goods are too great to be enjoyed by a single person. That to transcend from this binary we need to meet somewhere in the middle so that it can be enjoyed by all people.

I believe that if we take what we have learned from both Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee we can apply this idea onto the simplistic binary of globalization. There are the people who hate globalization because it is taking away at the jobs in the United States, and then there are the people who are for globalization who believe that it is beneficial for the health of the economy. What we need to do is to learn from these two authors and meet somewhere in the middle where we can both benefit from the positives of globalization and yet also limit the negative impacts of globalization in our country. An isolationist society (i.e. one with no globalization) is not the way to go for the future growth of the United States, and neither is sending many of our jobs overseas. So instead of complaining each time that we hear of a job going over sea, maybe, instead of buying all the cheap crap that we buy at Wal-Mart, we start buying more products that were made in the U.S. Because, if you think about it we are in a perpetual downward side in the U.S., where every American wants to have a good paycheck but also wants to get cheap products, and basically ‘more bang for their buck’. We could also transcend from this idea of globalization by seeing the jobs that are being moved overseas as a good thing, we are moving jobs overseas that are primarily in the manufacturing sector. We could set the United States as an innovator county instead of a manufacturing county.