Josef Fritzl, quite possibly one of the worst people on the planet (yet, surprisingly he’s never made Keith Olbermann’s list) is mad at the way the media is portraying him:
Mayer said Fritzl was bothered by the fact that he was being made out to be a monster. He said Fritzl told him, “I’m only being portrayed as a monster and not as someone who committed monstrous acts.”
Mayer made his comments when asked to confirm a report Wednesday by the newspaper Oesterreich that quoted Fritzl as saying he was not a monster and that without him, his 19-year-old daughter Kerstin would no longer be alive.
Got that? He keeps his 19-year old daughter underground for 19 years, but he’s the hero.
Jonah Goldberg had a good column about this a few years ago on a similar case of horrifying child abuse. An excerpt:
But at home we still don’t have a good vocabulary for monsters like the Dollars. We can call them monsters, but it doesn’t have the same effect anymore because the gears have been stripped from the word.
But, you know, it’s funny. I think we want — and need — a word for monsters. For example, my two-year-old daughter has never seen a film or a book that would give her the impression monsters as a group are evil, while she’s been inundated with the notion that they’re good and friendly. And yet this lover of Sesame Street is still afraid of monsters. She will use the word and ask me to scare them away.