Accessory to Murder

Accessory to Murder
A Sept. 11 handbag and the kitsch of tyranny.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, May 23, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT

While it's important to remember the attack on the World Trade Center, it's something else again to turn it into a fashion statement. Thus the fuss this week over a trendy women's clothing chain in Australia, the Quick Brown Fox, which has been selling beaded pocketbooks depicting the Twin Towers with one aflame and an airplane approaching the other. "Fury Over 11 September handbag" reported the BBC in a story Tuesday that went on to say some of the victims' families had got wind of this, and were--understandably--outraged.

As it happens, I've been intrigued for months by the Sept. 11-related kitsch on sale all over New York. When this story turned up, I had most recently been pondering a pair of miniature high-heeled shoes, entirely encrusted with red-white-and-blue rhinestones, displayed among the tourist knickknacks in a shop window near The Wall Street Journal editorial page's midtown Manhattan office. I'd been debating where, exactly, one draws the line between patriotic commemoration and raw bad taste.

This tale of the handbag, apparently a hot-selling item--not in some America-hating place like Iraq or France but among those good-natured Aussies--sounded so odd that I finally picked up the phone in New York and called the Quick Brown Fox's main shop, in Melbourne.

I can't say the conversation made things sound any better. The woman who answered the phone told me first that she didn't really want to talk about it: "We've done as much publicity as we wanted." But she did go on to confirm that the bags, boutique items made in China and priced at about $88 each, had sold out, and fast. I asked why people wanted them, and she explained, "Memorabilia. It's like taking a chunk out of the Berlin Wall."

She hung up before I could protest that the fall of the Berlin Wall was not exactly the equivalent of the collapse of the Twin Towers. The crumbling of the former stood for freedom, the destruction of the latter was the result of an obscene terrorist attack--and hardly an appropriate motif for Australian winter accessories. One might as well keep pictures of mass murderers around the house.

And then it occurred to me (and not for the first time) that many of us do, in fact, keep mass-murderer memorabilia on the shelves. I have some myself. For anyone who's ever done much traveling, especially to places such as Russia or China, odds are pretty good that somewhere along the way it was just too tempting to pick up one of those little busts of Lenin, or some of those laminated-and-tasseled pictures of Mao Tse-tung, or maybe that hokey wristwatch with Mao on the face, forever waving at you in a tick-tock rhythm. They're so easy to acquire. They make for such handy gifts back home. They're a curiosity, a little piece of history.

And yet. What we're basically talking about is killer kitsch. Lenin and Mao were not innocent cultural totems, in the manner of, say, Elvis Presley. They were tyrants, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. Lenin imposed on Russia a communist system that spread around the globe and created the gulag, sent satellite and client nations on four continents backward into poverty, killed tens of millions and established a blueprint for tyranny so viciously durable that in places like China, North Korea and Cuba its repressive machinery still grinds on.

As for Mao, bilingual copies of his plastic-covered Little Red Book were auctioned off by Sotheby's last year for $200 or more a pop, and at much lower prices they are still a popular souvenir item on China's tourist circuit. I doubt many are being bought as reference material. They just seem sort of fun, with those nifty red covers. It's easy to forget that these were the books waved by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, a stretch in which Mao unleashed true hell on his own people, urging children to inform on their own parents, sending city folk to starve in the countryside--and bragged about it.

Or take those ever-popular posters of Che Guevara, with his dark locks and rakish beret and that romantic aura of revolution. Hang one on your wall and it seems to whisper that you are somehow young at heart. But there is no romance whatever in the realities that Che's guerrilla cause engendered. It has produced violence, upheaval and poverty wherever it has touched Latin America. In Cuba it has meant more than 40 years of deprivation and repression.

But still, we buy the leftovers, we dabble in the debris. In my own case, for years I forbade the bringing of Lenin memorabilia into the house. It seemed to me not much different from keeping Hitler souvenirs on the coffee table--the point at which most Americans and Europeans, at least, seem to draw the line. I finally broke my own rule while covering a street protest in Moscow, in the mid-1990s. Russian ultranationalists were demonstrating outside the U.S. Embassy, chanting anti-American slogans and waving their fists. I got into a conversation with one of them, in which, before he went back to shouting insults at the embassy, he told me he'd always wanted to visit America--he had relatives there. Then he whipped out a faded piece of red cloth, adorned with an embroidered silhouette of Lenin, done in a neat cross-stitch, and asked if I wanted to buy it. I did, perhaps as a token of the weird crosscurrents at work in the modern world. But it still meant bringing a Lenin icon into the house.

There's a case to be made that in reducing tyrants, or terrorists, to coffee-table items or decorations for a bathroom wall, we are deflating their importance or defying their grotesque grandiosity. Orville Schell, writing 10 years ago in The Atlantic Monthly, noted that after Tiananmen Square, Mao kitsch was making a comeback among the Chinese themselves. He went on to speculate that this was less a matter of deifying Mao than of defying his legacy.

Perhaps. And maybe in unfree places such as China, double-edged symbols are the only option. But for the rest of us, in this age of global trade and cross-cultural collisions, when almost anything catchy can be mass-produced and on the market almost overnight, when beaded handbags showing very fresh moments of true horror in New York can so easily be churned out in China, shipped to Australia and snapped up as a cool new bit of kitsch, it seems worth thinking a little more carefully about the bits of history we choose to buy.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."