Since the beginning of civilization, human beings have created memorials. The purpose of the memorial is to help us to deal symbolically with the forces of grief and death. As a symbol of these forces, and of our recognition of them in our lives, the memorial provides a way of understanding tragedy and overcoming it. In addition, the memorial acts as a focal point for communal interaction; it speaks to us not as individuals with private concerns but as a community with shared experiences and shared sorrows. As an art form, the memorial is one of humankind’s earliest and most necessary creations.
In the year since September 11, 2001, many memorials have been constructed to address the tragedy of that day. The “Tribute In Light” at Ground Zero and the “United In Memory” quilt (which will be on display, in part, at the John F. Kennedy Museum from September 11 to September 30) are perhaps the two best known examples. A more modest memorial exists outside of Shanksville, Pa., at the Flight 93 crash site. Plans are underway for a Pentagon memorial as well.
Regardless of whatever I feel about the design and execution of these memorials, I find it hard to deny that they have been created out of a sincere and deep-felt need to cope with tragedy. The same holds true of the works of countless artists and organizations that have created art in response to September 11 (those interested in learning more detail about this work are directed to visit the National Coalition Against Censorship’s website at www.ncac.org/projects/art_now). The best of this art approaches the purpose of the memorial; it helps us to understand, it asks us to question our relationships with grief and death, and it encourages us to become involved in the community of our fellow human beings.
But in the shadow of our memorials, weeds have grown. In the past year, the marketplace has become saturated with merchandise purporting to “memorialize” the tragedy while turning a quick buck.
A friend of mine who visited Ground Zero a few months after the tragedy reported that the area was already full of salespeople hawking t-shirts and sno-globes with tiny bulldozers inside. A bar near the site advertised “The Closest Beer To Ground Zero”. The weeds of consumerism grow fast. As my friend put it succinctly, “Only America could turn tragedy into a t-shirt in 24 hours.”
Hearing all this, I decided to do a little research of my own; I performed a brief on-line search. In addition to the standard array of flags and t-shirts, hats, sweatshirts and even tank-tops (which, I suppose, allow you to show how conscientious you are even when working out), I unearthed such questionable gems as the “Ricky Rudd Memorial 2001” toy race car, here described: “This memorial car is decorated with the U.S. Flag on the hood to pay tribute to the terrorist attack on our nation on September 11.”
Via Yahoo, I linked to the “World Trade Center 9-11 Store,” where one can purchase such heartfelt and expressive items as the “September 11 Commemorative Key Tag,” the “September 11 Commemorative Heavy Duty Car Flag,” and even a “World Trade Center Flag Tie” which is “sure to delight the patriot in all of us.” Ah yes, the memory of 3,000 deaths reduced to a necktie; “delightful” is hardly the word that springs to my mind.
To me, the widespread success of such merchandising indicates that there is potentially something seriously wrong with who we are as a people.
Let me try to explain what I mean. As much as the memorial works to facilitate community and understanding, merchandising disables that community by turning a shared experience into an individually possessed object. Merchandising bypasses questions and doubts, assuring us that everything is as it should be, that we are doing the right thing, and persuades us that the things we buy will guarantee us our virtues, absolve us of our responsibilities. We become convinced that owning some product that refers to the tragedy somehow means we “own” the tragedy itself, that we are part of it in some cosmic way.
Buying some piece of September 11 bric-a-brac does not mean that the tragedy happened to you. It does not mean that you share the grief of the victim’s survivors, and it certainly does not mean that you have done anything to help in the healing of that grief. It confers no virtue upon you; it cheapens the virtue of others. But somehow, we convince ourselves that is otherwise.
Grief is a dangerous advertising strategy. To cajole a nation to tears in order to drum up business does more than insult those whose grief is very actual and terrible, it misdirects our impulse to real compassion and turns our attention away from the ones who been truly affected. These products which claim to express sympathy and unity serve really to enhance our delusions of sainthood; they allow us to be selfish and think ourselves selfless: “I bought the headband that says ‘We Will Remember’, so no one can accuse me of forgetting.” We want to do the right thing, and I’m not saying that’s bad. It’s noble to want to do the right thing. But to allow advertisers to convince us that doing the right thing is as simple as buying the right bumper sticker is downright dangerous.
What it means is that our culture becomes ever more desensitized, delusional, and ignorant of itself.
The merchandising of grief accomplishes the opposite of the memorial to grief; it is a kind of anti-memorial. By appropriating the symbolic meaning of the memorial and attaching that meaning to any given product in an effort to increase sales, merchandising disperses and devalues that meaning.
Memorials are symbols and like all symbols they lose meaning when applied to multiple ends. When a symbol is cheapened, what it stands for is also cheapened. Its meaning becomes diffuse and useless. When we no longer understand our symbols, we no longer understand ourselves.
Moreover, the memorial is, above all, a communal symbol, one whose essential function is to provide a collective meaning. When we lose the symbolic power of the memorial, we lose the sense of communal connection that the memorial symbol originally furnished. Without that connection, the symbol becomes a superficial mark, a badge admitting entry into a space that we feel no real connection to. We become tourists of tragedy; we vacation in the grief of others, pretending it is our own while knowing we can leave when the going gets rough, when the glamour of self-righteous indignation becomes overweighed by the intense pain of personal loss, the healing of which is a responsibility too gruesome for most of us to bear.
How much simpler to wear a t-shirt proscribing the sentiment “United We Stand” than to actually stand united, to actually work out what that really means and live it as a fact. We remain strangers to one another; we remain strangers to that better part of ourselves that is revealed only in our connection to each other, as human beings, as frail creatures bound by blood to a frail world.
The inability to deal constructively with grief and death is a symptom of our age; it is not surprising that the memorial, a symbol linked strongly to both conditions, should be something that intimidates us. Perhaps there is something in the way the memorial forces us to realize our common frailty in the face of death that we as Americans, or simply as people, cannot face. Perhaps we see a threat to our cherished notions of individuality and strength. So we cheapen the symbol to rob it of it’s power to intimidate and de-individualize us, and we feel safer then. But we have also robbed the symbol of its power to enlighten us, to help us understand and to aid in the process of healing. And we are left with a false sense of safety, a wound left untreated.
All this does not reflect positively on who we are. If we cannot treat our past with respect, what does that mean about how we will approach the future? If we have lost the ability to feel compassion for the pain of others, and we are content to co-opt that pain through commercialization, what does that mean about who we are as human beings? Is our culture damned to be nothing but a trash heap of disposable knick-knacks and trite slogans? Is this the way we want ourselves to be remembered? Do we really believe that those who have lost loved ones in the tragedy of September 11 are to be comforted in any way by t-shirts and memorial key-rings?
The answers to these questions define not just our response to one particular instance of tragedy, but also define who we are, fundamentally and culturally, in regards to the universal tragedies of human existence, which are in action at all times, in all places of the world. This is a moral and ethical, as well as psychological, issue; it is one that we cannot afford to ignore.
As we work out how we want to remember September 11, we must also remember that what we do defines who we are. So, who do we want to be? The choice is still ours.