So grumpymutt and I were discussing a few passages in the McLuhan piece, starting at the top of page 17. "If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visual and typographic technology as victims of injustice." I assume that he's using "pathetic" here in terms of having pity for something in a sort of compassionate way, which is the way he uses it in the paragraph above.