Mixing Commerce With Consecration, Ctd

by Jonah Shepp

Matthew Hutson offers a theory as to why people are so offended that the 9/11 museum has a gift shop:

What people see in the 9/11 gift shop is a taboo trade-off. On one side of the exchange is cash, and on the other is not just a mug or a hoodie but something much larger. These items stand in for all the suffering they commemorate. The equation is quite simple: “They’re making money off my dead son,” one man told the Washington Post. Some people have a problem not with the merch per se — 9/11 T-shirts were not invented over the weekend — but with the location of their sale. I suspect they see a leveraging of museum visitors’ mourning into commercial gain.

We find taboo trade-offs offensive because secular goods are fungible and sacred ones are not. A hundred dollar bill or a new stereo or bike can be reduced to a single dollar figure, and can be traded for each other based on these values. But we consider certain qualities of life too rich and unique to undergo such valuation without significant loss. How do you put a price on your child’s life? Even to suggest such a thing—that perhaps your son’s bundle of charms and qualms and loves and drives could be squashed into one dollar figure — outrages us. By putting something on sale, “money becomes the most frightful leveler,” the German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in 1903. “It hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability.”

Hutson doesn’t mention the unidentified remains of 9/11 victims housed at the site, which lend it a grim solemnity that many believe make it an inappropriate venue for selling kitschy souvenirs or holding boozy donor galas. Jessica Goldstein points out, however, that even among museums that exist to document tragedies, it would be unprecedented if the 9/11 museum didn’t have a gift shop. She compares it to the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum, whose gift shop drew little controversy when it opened in 2001:

Kari Watkins, executive director of the Oklahoma City Museum, said the gift shops serve two important purposes. They help visitors commemorate the event, and they make a museum fiscally possible. “People come from around the world. They want to remember. They want a token to take back with them,” she said. In the case of her museum, “The store is 25% of our museum revenue.”

There’s been a gift shop at the Oklahoma City Museum since it opened, she said. “We had people who didn’t like it,” she added, even though everything that’s sold there has to be “very mission-related. We’re heavy on the books, postcards, apparel, some things that kids can relate to.” Today, the store at the Oklahoma City Museum offers the same type of merchandise as the 9/11 store: stuffed puppies in rescue dog vests, “Survivor Tree” Christmas ornaments, mugs, charms, apparel.

I grew up in New York and lived through 9/11, and though I was fortunate enough not to lose any friends or relatives on that day, I know people who did – I think most New Yorkers are only a degree or two removed from a 9/11 victim. I haven’t visited the museum, so I’m hesitant to form too strong an opinion, but my gut reaction is to see the museum’s commercial side as a profanation of a place that continues to hold deeply painful and traumatic personal associations for tens or even hundreds of thousands of people.

On the other hand, the museum will need to sustain itself, and people who travel to New York to see it will want to take home mementos of their visit. And this isn’t exactly new, either: I remember taking some friends from Virginia downtown in October 2001 to bear witness to the tragedy, and I could hardly count how many souvenir stands had already popped up on the sidewalk, mere blocks from the rubble. At the time, we were all too shocked to be offended, and grateful, for that matter, that people were coming to New York and spending money here.

But when all is said and done, I think what is really driving the outrage here is that this museum exists in such close proximity to the unidentified remains of a thousand dead human beings whose families are still grieving and will probably never experience the closure that comes with burying their loved ones. Even though the repository is separate from the museum and not open to the public, I can see why victims’ family members would find it troublesome that NYPD t-shirts and commemorative bookmarks are being sold a stone’s throw away.