Maybe I’m just looking back with rose-colored glasses, but it seems to me that there was once a time when a tragedy or disaster was given a wide berth… people would wait a long time before trying to make money off of it; those who didn’t were lambasted and shunned.
But that’s not the case anymore, especially after George W. Bush made so much hay from the September 11th horror, using it to make his very own horrors.
It didn’t take long for Discovery Channel, A&E, and even CBS to rush programs on the air, and those programs have only proliferated since then; then came the quackery — the commemorative coins, commemorative posters, commemorative spoons…
and now, the feature films.
First there was Flight 93, now Oliver Stone — who else — chimes in with “World Trade Center.”
No one is ever going to let those people rest, are they?
You know when I think this happened? When Dr. Ballard discovered the remains of Titanic. The site of a tragedy, which has since been exploited continuously — just this week, a huge, multi-ton piece of the ship was lowered into a downtown San Francisco mall by a crane, for an exhibit.
Every tragedy is an opportunity for someone to make money.
