Within minutes after the collapse of the World Trade Center, inspirational songs, propagandistic images designed to feed the fires of patriotic fury, and poetry commemorating the victims began to proliferate on radio, television, and the Internet. The Dixie Chicks performed an a cappella rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner”; car-window decals appeared featuring a lugubrious poodle with a glistening tear as large as a gum drop rolling mournfully down its cheek; refrigerator magnets of Old Glory flooded the market (“buy two and get a third one FREE!”); and the unofficial laureates of the World Wide Web brought the Internet to a crawl by posting thousands of elegies with such lyrics as “May America’s flag forever fly unfurled, / May Heaven be our perished souls’ ‘Windows on the World’!” Gigabytes of odes to the lost firemen and celebrations of American resolve turned the information superhighway into a parking lot:

My Daddy’s Flag

Arriving home from work and a trip to the store,

My 5 year old daughter greeted me at the door.

“Hi daddy!” she smiled, “what’s in the bag?”

“Well, daddy has brought home the American flag.”

With a puzzled look she asked “What does it do?”

I answered, “it’s our country’s colors, red, white, and blue.

This flag on our house will protect you my dear,

It has magical powers to keep away fear.”

Does an event as catastrophic as this one require the rhetoric of kitsch to make it less horrendous? Do we need the overkill of ribbons and commemorative quilts, haloed seraphim perched on top of the burning towers, and teddy bears in firefighter helmets waving flags, in order to forget the final minutes of bond traders, restaurant workers, and secretaries screaming in elevators filling with smoke, standing in the frames of broken windows on the 90th floor waiting for help, and staggering down the stairwells covered in third-degree burns? Perhaps saccharine images of sobbing Statues of Liberty and posters that announce “we will never forget when the Eagle cried” make the incident more palatable, more “aesthetic” in a sense, decorated with the mortician’s reassuringly familiar stock in trade. Through kitsch, we avert our eyes from tragedy, transforming the unspeakable ugliness of diseases, accidents, and wars into something poetic and noble, into pat stories whose happy endings offer enduring lessons in courage and resilience.

And yet while kitsch may serve to anesthetize us to the macabre spectacle of perfectly manicured severed hands embedded in the mud and charred bodies dropping out of windows, it may conceal another agenda. The strident sentimentality of kitsch makes the unsaid impermissible and silences dissenting opinions, which cannot withstand the emotional vehemence of its rhetoric. It not only beautifies ghoulish images, it whitewashes the political context of the attack which, when portrayed as a pure instance of gratuitous sadism, of inexpiable wickedness, appears to have had no cause, no ultimate goal. Four months to Bush’s “crusade,” despite clear successes, we remain far from certain about what, in the long run, we hope to achieve.

Source: Daniel Harris, “The Kitschification of September 11,” in Afterwords: Stories and Reports from 9/11 and Beyond, compiled by the Editors of Salon.com and David Talbot (New York: Washington Square Press, 2002), 203–5.