The Count is Now: 100

Some things make me angry, other things just make me sick. Say what you will about 9-11 being politicized, but at least most thinking people could agree that it is not fit fodder for advertising. That the add implies that what happened that day was a good thing is what really has turned my stomach.

This is wrong, just fucking wrong.

(Link via Vodka Pundit)

(The origin of The Count can be found here.)

Update: Sometimes serendipity just happens. I am currently reading The Substance of Style by Virginia Postrel. In chapter 3, in which she analyzes the debate over the value of design, she relates the experiences of a designer aquaintance on 9-11:

When terrorists slammed two passenger jets into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Michael Beirut had his own moment of Nazis-to-Pepsi self-doubt. He was in London and returned home to Manhattan a jew days after the attack. "As a designer," he wrote me, "I am still reeling from the images of 9/11." The act had been horrifying, but the images it created could not have been better designed: "The timing of the collisions, the angle of the second plane, the colors of the explosions, the slow-motion collapsing of the towers: could the terrorists ever dream how mightmarishly vivid this would be to the vast viewing audience?"

(snip)

He knew better. The destruction of the World Trade Center was not a carefully composed movie scene, designed to arouse pity and terror within the safe frame of fiction. It was the all-too-real murder of thousands. It was entirely substance.

That is why I find the advertisement so repugnant. It had stripped the meaning of the attacks down to the mere destruction of two buildings, and that those buildings were only symbols of American Corporatism. From the distance that those skyline pictures were taken, it would be impossible to see people. Yet even in the second photo, one must remember that each of those buildings contain hundreds to thousands of people each. Taking away the loss of all of those who died that day and seeing only the capitalist symbols being removed is nothing less than vile.