Wednesday, March 3, 2010

The Public Duty Doctrine.75: Sleeping Beauty

The Arts & Leisure section of Sunday's New York Times (2-28-10) ran an article entitled "Violence That Art Didn't See Coming," by Sam Tanenhaus. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/arts/28bishop.html

His message: Novelists and Hollywood writers dropped the ball in predicting, through their art, the kind of violence demonstrated by Amy Bishop, "... the neuroscientist arrested for shooting six colleagues, killing three, at a department meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville."

Tanenhaus states, "Rampages of this sort have become familiar. But with rare exceptions they have been the preserve of men: lonely, alienated psycho killers with arsenals of high-powered weapons and feverishly composed manifestos." "... the culture is still relatively unprepared for a female killer of the kind suggested by the case of Amy Bishop..."

In a much broader sense, beyond the particulars of the Amy Bishop case, I believe that novelists and Hollywood writers, through a conspiracy of silence, have failed to portray the plight of women in our violent culture. The concept of The Public Duty Doctrine, specifically or generally, is, and has been, conspicuously absent in their writings. The above article should have been entitled, "Violence That Art Turned Its Back On."

John Grisham, Dick Wolf, Jerry Bruckheimer, are you listening?

When a woman calls 9-1-1 or gets a restraining order, does she know that government and its agents (police, district attorneys) have no legal duty to protect; they cannot be held liable for failing to protect because there was no legal duty to protect in the first place?

Women have been betrayed by the criminal justice system and the Arts (writers and producers, like Grisham, Wolf, Bruckheimer).

If I were among those purveyors of lies, I would be afraid -- oh, so afraid -- when the slumbering feminine awakes.


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