"9/11 is a very powerful marketing tool," says branding expert Rob Frankel, author of "The Revenge of Brand X: How To Build a Big Time Brand on the Web or Anywhere Else." "It's a touchstone to get closer to the buying public - everyone connects to it on an emotional level. Mention 9/11, and I'm that much closer to making a sale."

Recall the vendors who swiftly set up shop near ground zero, peddling postcards, pictures and T-shirts - anything bearing an image of the World Trade Center towers.

Vultures, B.L. Ochman calls them. She lived three blocks from the towers and was in the street when the first plane struck. She saw the people jumping. She doesn't need a souvenir to remember.

"It's ghoulish. It's disgusting that someone would try to make money off of that," says Ochman, a strategist who blogs on Internet marketing trends at whatsnextonline.com.

Even in subtle nods to the attacks, "Our emotions have been played on." Whether it's a company's trumpeting its 9/11 fundraising efforts in its advertising campaign or a product newly packaged in stars and stripes, Ochman says, "No amount of connection is the right amount of connection."

Now, at the five-year mark, a wave of commemorative plates and coins is washing up on the nation. For $29.95, collectors can buy a new coin featuring a standing imprint of the towers, said to be made of silver recovered from ground zero. Five dollars from each order is said to be donated to "official 9/11 family charities and memorials."

"What are we really supposed to take away from these [commemorative items]?" asks Frankel. "To me, it's profiteering. But I'm no more offended by that than I am by Oliver Stone, who is clearly leveraging the public and nation's pain for his personal gain."

After the attacks, Heller, author and director of humanities at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., was troubled to see the speed with which the event was packaged by American popular culture. She explored the phenomenon in a book of essays, "The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity."

The selling of items on eBay, the president's urging Americans to spend, the 9/11 logos on cable news networks, the beer commercials that referenced patriotism - "9/11 became part of our consumer culture ... and on the one hand, I found that difficult and disturbing," says Heller. "On the other hand, I saw it as part of a long tradition in our history ... as a genuine process of grieving."

Marketing, consumption and popular culture, she came to realize, "is how we as Americans make sense of things, how we construct meaning and narrative. And we have to see it as a legitimate, unique strategy in our history, something that defines us as a people and our distinctive national character."

Perhaps it's more pervasive in today's mass American culture, but she sees it as no different from the commemorative-statue industry that sprung up after the Civil War, when craftsmen advertised services to sculpt the likeness of fallen soldiers.

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