11 Portraits 9/11/01 the New York Times and the Pornography of Grief 1 Simon Stow

11 Portraits 9/11/01 The New York Times and the Pornography of Grief 1 Simon Stow “We will read their names. We will linger over them, and learn their stories, and many Americans will weep.” —President George W. Bush, 9/14/01 Modernity has been marked by a triumph of private grief over public mourning; in memorialization, pornography is now the dominant mode. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more evident than in the New York Times series “Portraits of Grief”—the newspaper’s publication of individual biographies of the New York City victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. For, although the series was conceived of, and praised as, a form of “democratic” mourning—transcending race, gender, sexuality, and economic status by assigning equality to the deceased—placing the series in its historical context suggests that such individuation would have long been considered decidedly anti- democratic—permitting private grief to intrude upon the anonymous public mourning considered essential to the well-being of the city. Turning to the Greeks for critical leverage on our current practices, this chapter traces the long-standing connection between pornography and death, and it identifi es both the prurience at the heart of our contemporary modes of mourning and remembrance and its potentially negative conse- quences for the American democratic process. To suggest that America’s dominant mode of public mourning is por- nographic is, however, to be forced to engage with some of the frenzied emotion that it necessarily engenders, that which, it will be argued, robs its victims of the balanced perspective that the Greeks believed was essential to democratic discourse. It is therefore necessary to distinguish what is being argued here from some of the more hyperbolic or problematic claims with which it might otherwise be grouped, such as that of Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who, in 2005, became the bête noire of the conservative media when his essay questioning the “innocence” of the World Trade Center attack victims was widely circulated in the Inter- net. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Churchill suggested that the dead—who, he said, “formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution Keniston & Quinn new 3rd pages.i224 224 6/11/2008 1:20:30 PM Portraits 9/11/01 225 America’s global fi nancial empire”—were guilty of the type of unthinking- ness and evasion of moral responsibility that Arendt ascribed to the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann—claims about the victims of the attacks. Likewise, William Langewiesche’s discussion of possible looting by New York City fi re fi ghters as the towers fell—which produced a similar outcry— was a claim about the dead. While it is clear that the uncritical depiction of the fallen—a tradition which, as Socrates’s criticism in the Menexenus suggests, stretches back to the Ancients—is part of the problem, the claims being made here are claims about us, the living—about the producers and consumers of what is being termed the “pornography of grief.” As such, the subject matter is our contemporary practices of American public mourning, not the worth, or otherwise, of the fallen. “PORTRAITS OF GRIEF” AND CONTEMPORARY MOURNING On September 17, 2001, the New York Times began to publish a series of brief essays on the men and women believed killed six days earlier in the terrorist attack on the city’s World Trade Center. Based on discussions with the families of the lost and offering what one of its writers called “a snapshot of each victim’s personality, of a life lived” (Scott), under head- ings such as “Host of Patio Parties,” “Daffy Downhill Skiing,” “Too Busy to Retire,” and “Striving for the Best,” the paper titled the series “Portraits of Grief.” When it offi cially ended fi fty-one weeks later—on the eve of the fi rst anniversary of the attacks—the Times had offered 1,910 sketches of lives lived and lost, 2 sketches that were collected together in 2002 and published as a book entitled Portraits of Grief 9/11/01. A second edition of the book, published in 2003, offered a total of 2,310 obituaries, providing the additional details of the lives of those whose families chose to cooperate with the project once the initial series was over and, in at least one case, removing from the offi cial record an individual whose existence and victim status could no longer be verifi ed ( Times “Editors”). Although some families declined to have their relatives or loved-ones included in the series, the Times offered portraits of the great majority of the World Trade Center victims, and while one writer noted that a “small number of family members complained, saying certain profi les had failed to capture the people they knew” (Scott), the response was overwhelmingly positive. The 2002 Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Times for “Public Service” specifi cally mentioned the “Portraits of Grief” profi les. The Boston Herald asserted that the series was “a memorable way to engrave the costs of terror- ism on American hearts for the rest of our days” and called it “[o]ne of the most remarkable accomplishments in American journalism” (“Victims”). The series was featured on Nightline, its writers feted and photographed in Vanity Fair, and one of its editors interviewed on The Today Show. Letters T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution Keniston & Quinn new 3rd pages.i225 225 6/11/2008 1:20:30 PM 226 Simon Stow from readers testifi ed to the popularity, impact, and perceived appropriate- ness of the “Portraits,” and even one of the few dissenting voices—the novelist Thomas Mallon—admitted in an essay that was otherwise critical of the series: “These Portraits were, it is not an exaggeration to say, the talk of the city . a conversation staple . a matter of pride” (6). Nor was the praise for the series confi ned to New York City. The Oregonian started publishing the profi les in mid-September 2001. In October, the paper’s Ombuds- man Dan Hortsch raised the question of when The Oregonian would stop publishing the series. According to the Times ’ own reporting of the story, “When he checked his voice mail that afternoon, he found 68 messages. Hundreds followed. The gist, he said, was: Don’t stop” (Scott). Attempting both to explain the popularity of the series and to add their own voices to the chorus of praise for it, a diverse group of academics and intellectuals offered assessments. “Every day, for several months,” wrote Howard Zinn, “the Times has been doing what should always be done when a tragedy is summed up in a statistic: it has painted miniature portraits of the human beings who died in the attacks” (33). Similarly, novelist Paul Auster observed, “One felt, looking at those pages every day, that real lives were jumping out at you. We weren’t mourning an anonymous mass of people, we were mourning thousands of individuals. And the more we knew about them, the more we could wrestle with our own grief” (Scott). Indeed, the individuation of the dead drew the most effusive praise. The suggestion that, by offering these “snapshots” the writers allowed their readers to understand the enormity of the event, was made repeatedly. “The peculiar genius of it,” noted Kenneth T. Jackson, professor of history at Columbia University and director of the New York Historical Society, “was to put a human face on numbers that are unimaginable to most of us. As you read those individual portraits about love affairs or kissing children goodbye or coaching soccer and buying a dream home . it’s obvious that every one of them was a person who deserved to live a full and successful happy life. You see what was lost” (Scott). Scholars of memorialization might note, however, that such individuation of the deceased was by no means original to the “Portraits of Grief” series. Throughout the twentieth century, identifying the dead by name has become something of a commonplace in memorialization of war and tragedy. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial with its approximately 58,000 names is, perhaps, the most famous example of the phenomenon, but the memorial to the victims of the Oklahoma City Bombing is similarly specifi c: it consists in part of 168 bronze chairs, each marked with the name of a victim, including nineteen half-sized chairs to memorialize the children killed in the Alfred P. Murrah Building’s day-care center. Similarly, the great majority of the panels on the Aids Quilt commemorate an individual who died of the disease, and a reading of the names of the deceased is a tradition that accompanies nearly every public display of the artwork (Names). Indeed, fi rst among the requirements for the design of the World T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution Keniston & Quinn new 3rd pages.i226 226 6/11/2008 1:20:31 PM Portraits 9/11/01 227 Trade Center memorial was that it “[r]ecognize each individual who was a victim of the attacks” (Lower Manhattan 19). The proposed memorial for the 184 people killed at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, is similarly rich in individual detail. Each victim is to be memorialized by an individual marker: 59 of them will point toward the Pentagon, commemorating those killed in the building, and 125 will face outward, commemorating those killed on American Airlines Flight 77. The markers themselves are to be arranged according to the age of the victims, with the western edge of the site to be defi ned by an “age wall” that grows an inch in height relative to the age represented by the memorial markers (Pentagon).

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