The streets around Ground Zero are awash with peddlers of all sorts of 9/11 tat, from New York Police Department (NYPD) and Fire Department of New York (FDNY) baseball caps to T-shirts with the burning twin towers and pens with 'We will never forget' motifs.

The same is true of all the souvenir stores in Manhattan, which have begun stocking the soon-to-be ubiquitous 'Remembered' postcards depicting the flaming towers, the rubble at Ground Zero and the body of FDNY chaplain Mike Judge, among other gory pictures.

On television, commercials cash in in more subtle ways. The images of pain and heroism that marked the media blitz of the attacks wrought strong emotions from viewers. Producers have harnessed this outpouring of emotion to tempt people into buying products they don't need. The flag being raised by three firemen at Ground Zero, fearful faces on city cops, helpless old people being helped by strangers: these images all stirred feelings of patriotism on Sept-ember 11. Today, variations on those themes are being used to evoke those emotions via advertisements for vacuum cleaners, soap and pet food.

Take Budweiser for example. Immediately after 9/11 the brewer of America's most popular - and insipid - beer began an ad campaign that featured nothing but the American flag waving in the wind. It had no words except the brewer's logo. Overnight, billboards became huge flags along the sides of roads, projecting an image of patriotism and extolling the virtues of Americanism that, by simple process of association, became bywords for the brewer too. Car advertisers and mobile-phone service providers have become even craftier in their unashamed abuse of peoples' sensitivities to sell their products, especially in their appeal to viewers' sense of freedom.

Your average car, for instance, would once have been advertised on television driving through the Californian countryside. Now it hurtles at top speed through busy Manhattan avenues, complete with cliched street steam and newspapers fluttering in the wind. The message is simple: we won't be beaten and we will do what we want to do.

Dodge Motors had no qualms about advertising its cars and trucks with clips of dust-covered firemen, policemen and ambulancemen walking in slow motion from a disaster scene. The images were not taken from 9/11, but they were intended to hark back to the day when the gallantry of the emergency services embodied the national spirit.

When it comes to music, there is no such thing as subtlety. Aside from the myriad benefit gigs and records musicians have been mercenary in their use of the tragedy to sell CDs. Country and western singer Toby Keith was just another twangy, mediocre performer until he released his song Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue, containing the chest-puffing anti-Afghan lyric 'We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way'. It went to the top of the charts.

Advertising manager Mike Harp says: 'I grew really sick of country singer Alan Jackson wailing about how America and Ford weren't gonna take terrorism sitting down. 'And to prove it, we're gonna offer zero per cent financing ...' Give me a break.'

At the interval of the Super Bowl, the star-studded finale to the American Football season, U2 were trundled out to play in front of a giant rolling scroll bearing the names of those who died in the attacks. At the end of the performance, singer Bono opened his jacket to reveal a stars and stripes lining. More than 30 million viewers nationwide lapped it up.

Many Americans see the commercialisation of 9/11 as crass, but to non-Americans - especially those living in New York - it has become a daily irritation.

'The TV started to annoy me within about two days, when the news channels began branding the event,' says British media executive Robert Hawthorne, 30. 'They all had their own brand: 'America Under Attack', 'America United', and so on. As for the ads, they were, and still are, obnoxious: 'Brought to you by so and so, in memory of September 11 ...' They are exploitative and cloying.'

Accordingly, a new phrase has now entered the American lexicon: the 9/11 cringe. The cringe has been elicited a great deal in the past year, but expatriates fear they'll feel it a lot more in the run-up to the anniversary.

The phrase isn't designed to belittle Americans' response to the tragedy. But it recognises the fact that much of the country has become 9/11-centric. A classic 9/11 cringe happened in a bar in Hoboken, New Jersey, when a 30-something Irish regular pricked up his ears as David Bowie's video to his 1977 hit Heroes was broadcast on TV. When it finished, he was astounded when a younger patron loudly congratulated Bowie for having recorded a song honouring New York's firemen.

Such 9/11 cringes happen all the time, especially on TV, and almost always when the word 'hero' is uttered. In ads, children have been transformed from doting toddlers to 'little heroes'; on Father's Day, dads were elevated from parents to 'our own private heroes', and even pets are no longer scruffy scamps but 'furry heroes of the animal world'.

There has been no end to the misuse of the word. A new TV show called Life Moments promises interviews with women who are 'heroes of their own lives'. And yes, Bowie's Heroes receives more airplay than it did when it was released.