The title of this article "How my book became part of the “satanic sex stabbing”" caught my attention immediately. I was originally thinking about the type of horrible book would a person have to write to be involved in such an ordeal, but by the end of the article I just felt terribly for the author. His book The Werewolf’s Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten looks really funny. The author himself says the book is a "humorous self-help book for werewolves". What happened is that two women lured a man to their apartment in promise of "...a kinky, possibly Satanic, threesome." He was then "...stabbed and slashed..." by the women 300 times. Fun story right? Well for Ritch Duncan, the co-author of The Werewolf's Guide... it gets even better when his book is found at the scene of the crime, and all the media outlets who ran the story mentioned the book. However, they said nothing about it being a humor book, and made it sound like it was a legitimate guide for Werewolves and the book pushed these girls along to do such a strange thing.The article explains this situation and then it turns more or less into a rant about what's wrong with the media of today. He was angered that nobody running the story took the time to actually look at what his book is about, and I can't blame him. The media today is like nothing of the past. They seem to have no respect for a person's privacy, and thrive on running negative stories that speak only of tragedy. It seems to be that you cannot turn on a 5 o'clock news on a regular day of the week and hear anything pleasant. It's always, "In a car accident today..." or "When this convenience store was robbed...." and best of all "Three perished today when.....". It's twisted that our society focuses so much on the negative parts of life. I don't watch the news anymore because of this. I just don't want to hear it.
The author used some logos and pathos in writing this article. He used a nice combination of these rhetoric devices in the last few lines of the article, saying "
Was this the story of two cold-blooded, evil satanists whose ritual of sex, blood and murder was thwarted by police? Or was it a case of two relatively harmless wannabe wiccans who hadn’t mastered the concept of a safe word? Likely, the truth lies somewhere in between. But if we don’t know the answer to that question, it is worth asking: How good was this story? Was it worth the treatment those young women received as story after story about them filled with lies and half-truths spread all over the world? Because that’s what these ghastly novelty articles look like to me — a grievous wounding, by hundreds of little cuts." One can only speculate on these moral things. The man who the women cut up is not pressing charges, and it was allegedly a consensual occurrence from all parties. Were these women actually bad and the press brought this to our attention or did the press make them bad?
The article: http://www.salon.com/2011/11/27/how_my_book_became_part_of_the_satanic_sex_stabbing/singleton/
"Likely, the truth lies somewhere in between." I like that.
ReplyDeleteI like how you talk about logos and pathos.
ReplyDelete