Our Selfie Culture
Twin Tower circa 1993
Jerry Casale, aging rocker, married Kristi Napp on the 14th anniversary of September 11th in an event which included the Twin Towers as wedding cakes and box cutters as keepsakes.
Thus, the death of 3,000 people becomes the amusing backdrop for Hollywood nuptials.
What would Tish Baldridge think?
We are at that moment when 9/11 begins to solidify into history.
It’s the point in time when you are old enough to recall it as a vivid lived event yet be surrounded by folks too young to remember or perhaps not even born on that date.
The Casale wedding may pass off as the pinnacle of selfie tragic trivialization where a tool of mass death becomes a wedding give-away.
Box Cutters, Nice Touch
On 9/11 box cutters were the match which set the world ablaze.
They were used to gain control of the jetliners and are powerful and potent symbols.
Adopting them as wedding keepsakes gives new meaning to the phrase “till death do us part.”
It is a truly bizarre employment of symbolism.
A 9/11 referenced box cutter at a wedding gives me the slightest sense of what a black American must feel when they see a hangman’s noose deliberately deployed to incite.
It’s an emotionally jarring affront to humanity.
Some More Stolen Valor
9/11 is a truly epochal 21st-century event.
It has become an international reference point and redefined how we live our lives.
The personal appropriation of it as a motif for celebration is beyond narcissistic and more evidence of our penchant to make all the world about us.
(Imagine a Lincoln assassination-themed reception with take home derringers and cherry preserves cleverly disguised as gelling blood clots.)
Casale’s tasteless wedding reception makes Kim Davis’s refusal to deny a simple civil wedding ceremony to homosexuals all the more odd.
Casale’s is the license which should have been denied on the simple grounds of tastelessness.