What distinguishes the professional fundraiser from any other sort of commercial advertiser is that he has nothing to sell other than his complimentary toasters and his tote bags, his "Never Forget" T-shirts and his American flag car window clings. Because the altruist receives nothing commensurate with the money he gives, nonprofit organizations must ensure that they provide an adequate emotional boon to their benefactors, an intangible feeling of pride, a "warm glow," the sole "product" that the fundraiser really "sells." Charities must induce the consumer to do something that goes against his capitalistic instincts, to give something for nothing, a dilemma that leads them to employ the full rhetorical arsenal of kitsch, providing a particularly rich and satisfying spiritual reward in the complete absence of a material one. Charities are so kitschy precisely because they are an industry that packages the warm glow, the well-earned satisfaction we experience after limping to the finish line of an the AIDS walkathon sponsored by AmFAR or adopting a wide-eyed Central American waif through the Save-the-Children Fund.

But in the midst of epidemics and natural disasters, many Fortune-500 companies try to pass themselves off as charities, to slip into wallets already lubricated by the grease of legitimate, fundraising kitsch, such as Burger King, which is helping to "rebuild the American way of life" by selling $1 flag decals with their shakes and fries. After Sept. 11, the airwaves were flooded with corporate condolences from firms that should perhaps have donated to the FDNY's Widows and Orphans Fund the millions they squandered on prime-time television spots advertising their good Samaritanship, expressing their "horror," and dispensing their "thoughts and heartfelt prayers." Charity impersonators infiltrated the ranks of the Red Cross and the Twin Towers Fund, camouflaging their commercials as public service announcements, while hordes of unscrupulous entrepreneurs set up shop by promising to donate to the orphans of dead firemen 20 percent, a full one-fifth, of the proceeds they collected from the sale of their WTC coffee mugs and their "United We Stand" posters of the towers wrapped like an enormous Christo work in 110-story flags ("please support our country, every purchase helps. God Bless America"). Even a pornographic Web site that offers paying clients images of big-busted Asian women promised to donate 10 percent of its proceeds to relief agencies.

If there was something duplicitous about Wendy's asserting its intentions of selling hamburgers to make "our beloved nation stronger than ever," Coca-Cola blowing its own horn about the fruit juices it supplied the rescue workers, and Chase Manhattan Bank hanging a four-story American flag on the facade of its Midtown offices, there was something equally duplicitous about the consumers who responded to these blandishments and shopped up a storm under the thin pretense that, given a company's outpouring of concern, they were "giving" rather than "buying," donating their hard-earned dollars to a caring, compassionate organization that offered something a little more enticing than a thank-you note, a toaster, and a tax break. We discovered that we could have our cake and eat it too, enjoy that laptop or that surround-sound stereo system and simultaneously bask in the warm glow. If corporations engaged in charity impersonation, consumers engaged in a similar fraud: benefactor impersonation, with both parties participating in a mutually beneficial game of self-flattery.

The marketing of self-congratulation finds a particularly susceptible consumer niche in a culture permeated with pop psychology, with its ever-more clamorous calls for emotional candor and its dire warnings about the dangers of bottling up potentially explosive feelings of anger, pain and grief. Soon after the attack, Oprah's Oxygen Media posted on its Web site a video of Cheryl Richardson, a self-styled "life coach," who advised viewers to "get your feelings up and out of your body in order to assist in the healing process," as if our emotions were toxic substances or medieval "humours," which exert damaging pressure on our internal organs, poisoning our systems if they are not purged or drawn out by professional blood-letters. Throughout the crisis, the constant refrain of politicians, celebrities, and even housewives was the necessity of beginning the process of "healing," which, in the current context, has nothing to do with recuperation, but precisely the opposite: with wallowing, indulging in the unnecessary prolongation of our misery, in the drama of living in a state of high alert.

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