Flag-Draped Voyeurism

By Michelle Goldberg, Salon. Posted August 29, 2002.

These days, ground zero smells like a fairground. The acrid chemical stench that poisoned downtown Manhattan for months has dissipated, and in its place are the summertime scents of hot dogs, cotton candy, roasting nuts and shish kabob, all competing to tempt the hordes of visitors to New York's newest blockbuster tourist attraction.

According to the New York Times, 3.6 million people will visit ground zero this year. There's no longer much to look at -- the expanse where the twin towers once stood is now just a vast construction site -- but people keep coming, disgorged by tour buses that idle nearby. There are giddy high school students in foam Statue of Liberty hats, dour families squinting under visors that read "Ground Zero NYC," religious groups including, on a recent visit, a few dozen Jews for Jesus in matching fluorescent orange T-shirts, middle-aged men staring intently into their camcorders and young guys strutting topless in the summer sun. Last Saturday one woman leaned into her husband and seemed, for a moment or two, to tear up, but mostly people seemed to be enjoying themselves in the perfunctory, listless way of tourists everywhere.

A whole cottage industry has sprung on the site's perimeter, a marketplace to peddle souvenirs of the catastrophe. Besides the aforementioned visors, there are Ground Zero NYC T-shirts and baseball caps. Five-dollar snow globes of the World Trade Center with police cars or fire trucks in the foreground swirl with red, white and blue sequin stars. Stall after stall sells $9.95 "Day of Terror" commemorative books, their covers decorated with pictures of the planes smashing through the buildings. DVD montages of the disaster -- running in a constant loop on the vendors' laptops -- go for $15 to $20.

George Peres, who has been selling stuff on the street for eight years and is finding unprecedented success with 9/11 merchandise, says he sells between 10 and 20 DVDs a day, as well as around 80 books. Across the street, Orlando Hollis, who lives in Washington but comes to Manhattan to peddle his wares, says, "Some of the stuff out here, like showing planes crashing into buildings, that's offensive."

Hollis, who wears an NYPD T-shirt over fatigues, sells Osama bin Laden toilet paper. "Wiping out terrorism!" he calls to passersby. The rolls go for $6 each, with a 50-cent discount if you buy three or more. Hollis has to compete with several other toilet paper purveyors, including one nearby who advertises with a sign saying, "So he likes bombs, let's drop a few on him!" Still, he does OK, selling around 200 rolls a day.

Some people, perhaps many, visit ground zero to pay their respects, to commune with history through the sight of charred real estate, to get a sense of the enormity of what happened. Yet the atmosphere at ground zero is nearly devoid of somber reverence. It feels like just another sentimental landmark, a place for people to get their picture taken so they can tell the folks back home they were there. Amid the brightly dressed crowds, one senses that for those who didn't lose anyone, some inevitable American alchemy has transformed the attacks into entertainment.

Shortly after Sept. 11, the pioneering avant-garde electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen ignited worldwide fury by calling the attacks "the greatest work of art there is in the entire cosmos," a statement which spurred a Times of London article asking, "Is this the most hated man in contemporary arts?" He was excoriated for finding aesthetic pleasure in the murder of thousands. His statement seemed to embody the nihilism at the core of a purely aesthetic view of the world, a view which reduced all events to their reflected images and the intensity of their attendant sensations.

Such fey and distanced triviality was supposed to be incinerated by the excruciating reality of the slaughter. Remember how many critics predicted that, having seen true urban devastation, audiences would no longer glory in watching buildings and cities brightly annihilated at the movies? In a gesture toward the new sensitivity, Blockbuster started labeling terrorist-themed videos with the message, "In light of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, please note that this product contains scenes that may be considered disturbing to some viewers."

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