Eric Schlosser, "Global Realization"

Questions for Making Connections Within the Reading:

1. Eric Schlosser begins "Global Realization" with a visit to Plauen, which, he writes, "has been alternately punished, rewarded, devastated, and transformed by the great unifying systems of the twentieth century. . . Plauen has been a battlefield for these competing ideologies, with their proudly displayed and archetypal symbols: the smokestack, the swastika, the hammer and sickle, the golden arches." What are the "competing ideologies" to which Schlosser refers? What do the "archetypal symbols" he mentions represent?

2. Toward the middle of "Global Realization," Schlosser describes an experience he had during a trip to Las Vegas that "revealed the strange power of fast food in the new world order." What is the "new world order," and what role does the fast food industry have to play in it?

3. Schlosser's essay ends with a description of a bar in Plauen called "The Ranch," where he says "the old dream lives on, the dream of freedom without limits, self-reliance, and a wide-open frontier." Is the "old dream" preferable to the "illusion" that Las Vegas sells? If globalization is "the new dream," what are the goals of this dream? How does the new dream differ from the old dream?

Questions for Writing:

1. Schlosser argues that fast food "threatens a fundamental aspect of national identity: how, where, and what people choose to eat." Why are foreign nations threatened by the spread of fast food? Will nations continue to exist if the project of globalization is realized?

2. Schlosser insists that Las Vegas sells "the most brilliant illusion of all, a loss that feels like winning." McDonalds, presumably, is selling a similar illusion. What is lost when the fast-food industry succeeds? Is there anything that the consumer can do to combat this "loss that feels like winning"?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:

1. Schlosser writes, "In many ways Las Vegas is the fulfillment of social and economic trends now sweeping from the American West to the farthest reaches of the globe." Is Las Vegas the logical end point of the "Age of Social Transformation" that Peter Drucker describes? Is globalization the inevitable by-product of the knowledge society?

2. Is globalization an attempt to flatten human experience and make it more manageable, or is it the realization of an aesthetic ideal, a way of "making special" as Dissanayake defines the term in "The Core of Art"? That is, can successful business practices constitute an aesthetics, or are they necessarily either a violation of or wholly outside the realm of the aesthetic?

More Schlosser assignments. . .