Cheapening It

I think everyone is struggling with how to remember 9/11 today, but a couple of local radio stations here have demonstrated how exactly NOT to go about it. First on the drive in this morning, while listening to my favorite sports talk radio station, 1310 "The Ticket", they played an ad for a segment they'd be doing later about 9/11. The same announcer they use to do their wacky bit ads read the ad with his "serious" voice, over the sound of jet airplanes flying in the background. You can ponder the incredible wrongness of that for a second.

Then this afternoon on KLUV-our local "oldies" format-I hear their segment on "remembering" the 9/11 victims, and it plays a snippet of Bush's famous 9/11 speech, as if people are going to want a reminder of the guy who got us into war in Iraq mixed in with their remembrance. Then they played Neil Diamond's song "Coming to America", a song about immigrants who want to migrate to America, which really has nothing to do with 9/11...unless maybe they were alluding to the terrorists who want to "follow us home", in a spectacularly tasteless way. Who knows? But if that's their idea of honoring the people who died, they'd be better off not to bother at all.