Just finished my last lecture. I’m exhausted and giddy at the same time. This last week of work has been a tough slog, so I required lots of breaks to keep going. I played some dumb online games and also read vast numbers of articles on that creep in Austria who kept his daughter and her children in a basement for 24 years.
We were talking about the evil side of human nature in my political theory class today. This guy is a poster child for ultimate evil.
I’ve been following the progress of this woman and her children with great interest. I’m fascinated by the kids’ development of language skills, a side obsession due to my speech challenge kid. The woman, who’s my age, has been aged prematurely because of the stress of the her environment. The kids who were kept in a basement are seeing cell phones and elevators and other people for the first time. Is it overwhelming or exhilarating? Aren’t they like Socrates’s prisoners in the cave coming out to see light for the first time?
Apparently, Austria is getting defensive about its history of meglomaniacs.
Apt. 11d 
I have 4 more days, then finals week. But then I get to go to Florida. Yay!
The Austria case has me freaked out, too. My daughter was looking over my shoulder as I was surfing and saw the CNN headline “Dad raped daughter” or something like that and she said “Dad rapped daughter? What does that mean?” I wasn’t quite ready to explain that one, so I said “It means he abused her, hurt her.” She accepted that.
I’m not quite sure how I’ll explain the Miley/Billy Ray Cyrus photo, though.
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The ‘aged prematurely’ claim I’m not sure I buy – many of us gray by our 40s – I started in my teens! – it’s just that most of us now can go down town to a colorist… Nice chutzpah reference from the Wall Street Journal…
Father of the Year
An Austrian man named Josef Fritzl “fathered seven children with his daughter while keeping her imprisoned in his cellar,” London’s Daily Telegraph reports:
Fritzl . . . has complained of receiving a bad press and not being given credit for keeping his dungeon family alive for more than two decades.
Fritzl, 73 claimed that media coverage was “unfair” and “entirely one-dimensional”, given the fact that he did not kill his daughter and the children he produced with her during 24 years of sexual abuse in a subterranean bunker in Amstetten.
“I am no monster,” Fritzl said though his lawyer Rudolf Mayer, according to the German tabloid newspaper Bild.
“I could have killed all of them, and no one would have known. No one would have ever found about it.”
This is a rather unpersuasive defense. In fact, it reminds us of that joke about the definition of chutzpah: a man who kills his parents, than pleads for mercy because the media failed to report that he’s an orphan.
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