This phenomenon isn't limited to poorly-Photoshopped Benghazi memes, although there are, admittedly, a ton of them out there to choose from. You can, if you're so inclined, find thinkpieces using September 11 as a platform for discussing the need to build a border wall, or the importance of saying "radical Islamic terrorism," or the apportionment of blame for the current state of global instability, or whatever other cause happens to be weighing heavily on the speaker's mind. Even Breitbart got in on the action, denouncing President Trump's failure this morning to call out the attackers' religion as just the latest instance of what Bannon and company view as this country's decades-long failure to acknowledge the true dangers posed by its enemies.

The victims of the Benghazi attacks do not deserve to be forgotten simply because the anniversary of their deaths happens to fall on the same day as a more famous tragedy. Honoring fallen heroes is not a zero-sum game. But it's tough to interpret some of the loudest and most vociferous invocations of Benghazi as entirely sincere when they come from opportunistic charlatans for whom the word has long served as a dog whistle aimed at securing murder indictments for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. For God's sake, Woods couldn't even get to the word Benghazi before betraying his motives, slipping in a shot at the man who was president when those attacks took place.

Time always makes even the most horrific moments in history seem a little less salient, which is why, for example, no one feels particularly aggrieved anymore when someone plays "John Wilkes Booth" in Cards Against Humanity. But what's gradually happening here isn't this garden-variety pattern of fading collective memory. It is the deliberate reimagining and re-branding of September 11, where the act of commemorating a human tragedy has taken a back seat to the search for new and more cynical ways to exploit it—this day, for many, is now just another opportunity to make a point. Maybe social media and political polarization and the eternal search for original angles have joined forces with time to make this process inevitable, but that does not make it any less jarring. And as the problem worsens with each successive anniversary, it will only become harder to watch.

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