Ultimately, attempting to discriminate between genuinely motivated and authentic products and those that emerged, full-formed, from the heads of the cynical and the greedy may be beside the point. More telling than why we create such merchandise may be the question of why we buy it. Why do we seek to relive the tragedy over and over, through memorials, documentaries, tours of Ground Zero, and full-color photography books?

Many of the sites dedicated to Sept. 11 merchandise repeat the mantra that it's important to remember, to never forget, what happened last fall. But do we want to remember in order to honor those who died, or have we tethered our boats to Sept. 11 out of a hunger for meaning, at a time when events with irrefutable, long-lasting impact are hard to come by, and news of an end-of-summer clearance sale is delivered with more hysteria than news of a typhoon in South Korea that killed 100 people?

While most of us are undeniably making a genuine attempt to remember the victims of 9/11, there's also a strange part of us that wants to experience a piece of the pain for ourselves. No matter how many times we see those planes slamming into those skyscrapers, we're never satisfied that we're close enough to the center of the suffering. Those of us who weren't directly affected, who didn't lose someone close to us, may have been searching for some big event to focus on.

We take to distraction naturally, as a society -- we're constantly in search of the next big event that can focus us outside of ourselves, whether it be a tropical storm brewing off the coast of Florida, a baseball strike threatening to delay the World Series, or a wildfire raging out of control in East L.A. We're unduly fixated on the steady flow of novelty fed to us through minute-to-minute updates, a constant barrage of breaking news, the latest numbers from the stock market, the latest horoscope, the latest figures on which movies pull in the most each weekend, the latest college football scores.

Maybe it's the ease with which we took in the spectacle of Sept. 11 and then cast it out again that haunts us. After weeks of watching TV and reading the paper and feeling sick to our stomachs, when we thought we'd never get over it, life suddenly returned to normal. Purchasing these little trinkets might be our way of pledging that we won't forget this event like we forget everything else on the pop-cultural conveyor belt.

But in some ways, buying stuff means we'll forget even faster. In America, pledging to remember is just another step on the road to forgetting. We buy new games and plan trips and put together photo albums and take vacations and shoot video and save ticket stubs, just to file it all away and move on to the next style, the next technology, the next car, couch, dress, job, the next distraction. Our screens are updated and refreshed constantly, we don't have to move a muscle to move forward, we don't have to think at all to change our minds, to put the last choice behind us.

Five basketball seasons, 53 movies, seven hair colors, two gym memberships, four long distance carriers, three girlfriends and two e-mail addresses from now, we'll be scrapping those commemorative plates at a yard sale. In America today, those who can't remember the past for more than two seconds without getting interrupted by their cellphones may be condemned to repeat it.

Recent Stories