Peddling 9/11: Get Yer Tragedy Here!

I'm just going to come right out and say this -- I am sick to death of hearing about 9-11. ENOUGH! Stop it! Cut it the freak out. Give it a rest. What's more, I know a lot of you feel the same way, too, and are just afraid to say so, right?

Before you go off and completely misunderstand me, let me explain what I am and am not saying here. I am NOT saying we should ever forget the horror of the day or the people who were butchered en masse or the families of those people or that we should stop memorializing or paying tribute. I'm not even suggesting we should never mention it again, or that it's inherently bad to be a patriotic American.

But here's the thing: Must the words "In light of the events of Sept. 11" or "In the wake of the events of Sept. 11" be included in nearly everything I see, read or hear from sunup to sundown, every day, for the rest of my own personal eternity, no matter how inconsequential or stupid the context?

I swear to God I saw a fashion story not long ago that said something like "In light of the events of Sept. 11, ladies are finding comfort in wearing more brightly colored hats." And it went on to tell you where you could buy some of the more expensive ones.

On a morning program a couple weeks ago, a man was hawking RVs and the RV salesman says to the TV anchor, "You know Thad, in the wake of the events of Sept. 11, people just feel safer traveling on the ground. So now's really the perfect time to buy that RV you've had your eye on."

Sometimes the shorthand version, "since 9-11" is used. Shortly after those plane-flying scumbags murdered thousands of people for no good reason, some "Entertainment Tonight" reporter was interviewing Brad Pitt, and asked him "Brad, how has your life changed since 9-11?"

Brad Pitt's life hasn't changed a whit "since 9-11." He's still living a charmed existence with plenty more money, houses, cars, vacations and Jennifer Aniston than any of us will ever see in our lifetimes. So, what, I'm supposed to feel sorry for him? And even if Pitt's life has changed, I don't give a rat's ass about it. I also don't care what Julia Roberts or Courtney Cox or Ben Vereen thinks about 9-11, either, for the record.

Those people aren't real. The people who were shredded unrecognizably while they fell through hundreds, maybe 1,000 feet of glass and steel and flaming jet fuel -- they were real. And there's nothing Brad Pitt or an RV or a buttload of brightly colored hats can do to unshred, unburn or unkill them. So knock it off.

In little more than a month, we'll again be buried in the rubble of maudlin, insincere, profit-making reminders of last September. I can barely stand to type the name of the month anymore, it's been so overused and misused, bastardized and cheapened over the past 10 months by morning news show geeks, vacuous celebrities and the triflings of unscrupulous trinketmongers who peddle patriotic coffee mugs and tote bags and bumper stickers.

A company in Georgia used recycled pieces of steel from the World Trade Center to make medallions, which it sold for $30 each. The Australian fashion chain Quick Brown Fox sells sequined handbags with pictures of planes crashing into the WTC for about $87. Vendors pushing pictures and memorabilia for profit swarm over ground zero like maggots.

I know there's an onslaught of patriotic cheesery heading our way again this year because already this week I received a CD in the mail. It's called "Spirit of America," and it's more awful than I can possibly tell you. The packaging is lousy with symbols of America: flags, the Statue of Liberty, the Marines War Memorial (Iwo Jima flag raising). On the cover is a picture of the pretty singer, Denise Nicole, but she could be any shiny-toothed huckster.

The music is that sort of badly recorded amateur type that sounds overly mechanical and inhuman, with horrible, trite, pep-rally lyrics: