After 9/11 a cottage industry arose to capitalize off the tragedy. Some of the memorabilia made explicit reference to the World Trade Center; where as other trinkets were tied to the events of 9/11 more obliquely. They weren’t selling World Trade Center stuff per se, but were nevertheless targeting the "America Stands Tall" Zeitgeist by producing a wave of general patriotic stuff, along with a host of firefighter, Marine Corp, and police-themed items.

Here are some standouts*. I found them almost exclusively in magazines like Parade, next to the Howard Huge cartoons. The ones I found especially creepy are the pieces that juxtapose military imagery with cutesy stuff like children and teddy bears. My friend Pat, a service man, pointed put it succinctly when he described the Precious Moments marine as a "cute, doe-eyed, killing machine."

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*This stuff being advertised on the page here is obviously marginalia. I was also going to write an essay on how tacky the mainstream advertising response was to 9/11 with the "Keep America Rollings" and the "Now More than Evers" style adverts, but I never did. I couldn’t make it funny.

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