On Sep 15, 2004, at 10:25 PM, Robert Seeberger wrote:
Warren Ockrassa wrote:
No-class, trash marketing at its worst.
<http://ncmint.com/uploaded/CNMI_Freedom_Tower.htm>
[...]
Am I the only one offended right to the core by this?
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I've seen the commercial several times, but it never occured to me to feel offended. To me it rings of "You can knock us down but we won't stay down. The lemons you hand us will be made into lemonade. The pain you caused us will become determination. The grief you gave us will be made into celebration."
Mm, that thought occurred to me as well, except for a few rather interesting footnotes. There's no charitable donation being made; the profits for the coins is all going into the coffers of the makers. (They claim they've donated, in the past, $1.5 million to WTC disaster relief and other such funds, but that doesn't exactly give carte blanche now to mint coins and take blood money).
The other thing I find interesting is that it's actually a coin issued by the government of the Marianas. Which is quite a distance from NYC.
I think that people who would buy such a coin felt the tragedy of 911 and would feel some sense of connection by being able to hold a piece of it in their hand. It's kind of ghoulish, but no less true for that.
It's true, but it's profiteering on misery. I don't see it as being different from charging admission to a traffic accident or selling bloodstained clothes as murder souvenirs.
I understand where you are coming from, but aren't funeral homes and cemetaries thriving businesses?
Yes, and they're performing a necessary service that requires skilled work and that they cannot provide for free. Minting coins using bloody silver is on a different valence of reality altogether.
Nobody *needed* these coins to be made. Nobody's life will be *improved* by them. This is simply a sick exploitation of a large -- and still very recent -- national tragedy in the name of making as much money as possible.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" Excerpt at http://www.nightwares.com/books/Flat_Out.pdf
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