Abstract

Island where all becomes clear. Solid ground beneath your feet.… Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs. The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here.… The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It [Ureka].” (Szymborska, 1998, p.173). Sanguine images likened to the Garden of Eden, Atlantis, heaven, and other soma-trenched reveries of seduction percolate in my mind when reading Szymborska’s poem “Utopia.” A Plantonist, maybe; nevertheless, codified within the romantic discourse of Szymborska and Huxley’s rhetorical flourish of soma and hypnopaedia is a sedating meta-narrative that permeates the history of Western discourse—progress. Every era has its idol, Holy Grail, catechism, meta-narrative of progress, and the 21st century is no different. In the 21st century, the idol of progress, or “Island where all becomes clear,” is the insidious of Globalization. My intent here is to explore two dimensions of the black hole that is Globalization, particularly (1) the subversive DNA of Americanization that is engineered into the term, and (2) imaginir, soma, and hypnopaedia as tools of seduction.