MOA versus American Pride
An interesting article on Atlantic Online called The Mall of America by Ian Frazier finds the author visiting Minnesota’s top tourism attraction and reflecting on it’s relevance to American culture. I especially enjoyed this bit of irony:

Not a single item in the USA America Pride store was made in America. I knew that already, just from common sense, but I began looking at the labels anyway. Blue baseball cap with the letters “FDNY” in white outlined in black on the front: Honduras. Black T- shirt with “Born in the U.S.A.” in red-white-and-blue letters: Honduras. Black baseball cap with “American Pride” in red-white- and-blue spangles: Bangladesh. T-shirt with comical image involving bin Laden and a camel: Dominican Republic. Coffee mug with picture of Twin Towers: China. And so on.

The Twin Towers mug really gets me. The commodification and misappropriation of disaster is more foul than a Todd Bertuzzi cheap shot. Why are American’s so monument/memorial obsessed? It’s fascinating following some of the debates around what is an appropriate memorial for the September 11th attack now being planned for Ground Zero. Many contend that whatever is built must be the monument of the millennium. The pyramids at Giza should be dwarfed and humbled by America’s architectural response to terrorism. Might we learn something from the Japanese who’s humble monument for the victims of the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima is little more than a photograph affixed to a marble tombstone.