What ever happened to the cash-ins and viral kitsch that circulated after the 9/11 attacks? It’s not the most important question of the weekend, but I was curious, having seen and gawked at all of this stuff 10 years ago, fitfully coping with the news. Slate’s invaluable Lauren Hepler and I checked all the sources, and we bring you: Five unwelcome flashbacks. Big thanks to Bill Ellis for his paper, “Making the Big Apple Crumble: The Role of Humor in Constructing a Global Response to Disaster.”
The much-imitated, much forwarded image of a bald eagle shedding a tear over the burning WTC was dreamed up by two artists on a Yahoo! Group. ”Waldron and I collaborated on this image on the day of the attack,” says Parneix. “He had sent me some images and they kept going back and forth until America Cries developed. It spread across the internet faster than I ever imagined, and authorship was claimed by at least 20 people, but all that was straightened out and the NYFD legal department now handle those issues.”
Lauren Hepler 