"If your company would like to go beyond typical marketing . . . Huge family participation coupled with the extraordinary setting makes the air show at Jones Beach a great opportunity for corporate sponsorship and VIP hospitality. Our participating sponsors link their brand with the exciting, patriotic event as they host their most valued clients, employees, family and friends in a truly first class setting. Hospitality tents lined up along the beachfront offer private beach enclosures and can be tailored to meet each sponsor's specific marketing aim . . . The Business Package includes 10 Tickets to the Jones Beach VIP Tent, and 4 VIP Parking Passes and you may also hang a small Corporate Banner inside the tent." Cost: $2000.00 (emphasis mine)
If the exhilarating and orgasmic air show is not enough, revelers can also celebrate the 10th anniversary of Long Island's American Air Power Museum. On this Memorial Day weekend 2010, now renamed "Salute to the Legends of Air Power" weekend, for just $35 "you can attend an exclusive event for sponsors, VIPs, and Air Show performers. A night of big band music, Warbird calendar pinups, Air Show pilot meet and greet, (view) Warbird and military aircraft, plus a private sunset Warbird flight demonstration . . . It doesn't get any better than this." Well perhaps it does. For just an additional $425 you can actually fly on a fully restored B17 aircraft, perhaps imagine yourself on a bombing mission over Dresden, Hamburg, or Tokyo and about to incinerate millions of innocent civilians.
This blatant commercialization of patriotic sentiment, exploitation of Memorial Day, and celebration of the killing instruments of war, demonstrates once again that the primary concern and motivation of banking and corporate executives, the primarysponsors of these spectacles, is profit. Their arrogance, insensitivity, and greed is an outrage to anyone who has proudly worn the uniform, loves America, and who understands and appreciates the nature of sacrifice and service to Country. Most grievously, it is to defile the memory of those young men and women who have lost their lives in war and an insult to their families who will never again caress their son, daughter, husband, or wife . . . and will never recover from their loss.
All Americans, therefore, who honor the memory and the sacrifices of our fallen brothers and sisters must raise their voices in outrage against this exploitation of Memorial Day and demand that these grotesque spectacles and celebrations of military machinery, commercial marketing, and military recruitment be cancelled or rescheduled to another occasion. Perhaps more sensibly, we should end this infatuation with violence and killing, turn these swords into ploughshares, and study and celebrate war no more.
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