February 28, 2010– The figure
of Amy Bishop haunts me. I fantasize covering her trial when it happens.
“Who
is she?” asked a graduate student and a law student earlier
this week.
The
question surprised me. Bishop has gotten so much media attention,
including my first blog about her. To recap: On February 12, a
biology professor at the University of Alabama/Huntsville who had been
denied tenure, she took a pistol to a department meeting , killed three
colleagues, and wounded three others. The New York Times has
published two front-page articles and more. People Magazine had
a March 8 story, “Murder on Campus.” It may have
been at the back of the book, but there it was—-between the scary
coverage of a minor celebrity gone missing at the Winter Olympic Games
(since declared a suicide), and the sweet coverage of a
nice man who rehabs sneakers for poor kids.
As a
result, we know more and more about this newly public figure. She was
proud of, even flaunted, her Harvard doctorate. She was distraught when
she was denied tenure at Huntsville. She and her husband, Jim
Anderson, were Trekkies, an aspect of her interest in science
fiction. People wrote that he stayed home to care for their
four children. And, she was a companion of violence. In 1983,
when she was 21, she killed her brother with a shotgun. No charges
were brought. Far less drastically, in 2002, she hit a woman in an
International House of Pancakes who took the booster seat she wanted. She
screamed at barking dogs. People’s first line: “You crossed
Amy Bishop at your peril.”
Such vivid
portraits of Bishop fit only too neatly into three stereotypes. She
compels our attention because all three apply to her. The first, which
can have its harmless charms, is that of academics as strange, nerds,
indifferent to norms and forms. A university student evaluation
said disapprovingly of a professor, “He wears the same pants every
day.” The second and third stereotypes mark the passage of the
strange into the frightening. One is about the scientist, the proud
proponent of reason, who unleashes irrational forces of destruction. The
other is about women. Meant to engender and nurture life, they turn
vicious, female pit bulls without lipstick.
Beyond
press coverage and beneath stereotypes, who is Amy Bishop really.
I wish I knew. I do gingerly map her onto other angry people —both men
and women—in academic life. They are always on the edge of hysteria
and temper tantrums. They exercise power by oscillating
between threatening to jump over the edge and actually doing it.
Bystanders and colleagues respond through placating gestures and through
shrugging denials of the psychic violence around them. How much did
Bishop’s family cover for her in this manner?
The
incessantly enraged are both far more overt and far less common than
standard issue passive aggressives. They content themselves by projecting
themselves as innocent victims of circumstances they have actually helped
to create. A trivial example: the man who complains widely that he
was refused access to the gym. He had never bothered to renew his
free membership.
My dismay
in not knowing who Amy Bishop is really is more than the
cliche-ridden inability to know who anybody really is—be
that anybody an intimate or a somebody with whom we connect through the
illusory intimacy of modern communications. My dismay is the symptom of
commingling fears: fear of impotence if a passive aggressive’s
self-serving narrative goes viral and finds wide acceptance; fear of
participating in a cover-up of the behavior of the perpetually angry; and
worst of all, fear that someone will “snap,” that oddly
benign word for the eruption of violence, in my presence, in my subway
car or faculty meeting.