Naming the Dead 
David Simpson
Among the many things that changed after 11 September was the policy on obituaries in the New York Times. Since the attack on the World Trade Center, the newspaper has been printing fifteen or so brief remembrances a day of some of the approximately five thousand people who died in the towers, in the planes and during the rescue efforts. The leaders of corporations and other more or less public figures who are ordinarily assured a place on the obituary page continue to appear there. The full page of photographs and memorials is for the firefighters, window-cleaners, janitors and waiters whose lives and deaths would normally have gone unrecorded by the most widely circulated newspaper in the United States, the newspaper of record for much of the nation. The Times is declaring itself as a paper for all New Yorkers, all Americans, and is paying proper homage to the ubiquity of death and the mournful democracy of grief. A parallel series of memorials to those killed in the attack on the Pentagon also appeared in the paper, part of the separate section devoted day after day to the events of 11 September and their consequences.
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David Simpson teaches English at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book is 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern will come out from Cambridge next year.
Other articles by this contributor:
Touches of the Real · Stephen Greenblatt
The Mourning Paper · war and showing pictures of the dead
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