commentary by Patrick H. Moore
A time passes a more complete picture of Adam Lanza is emerging. Among other things, based on a call he made to “Anarchy Radio” host John Zerzan on Dec. 11, 2011 at an Oregon college radio station, we now know that Lanza identified strongly with Travis, a chimpanzee who ripped the face off a Connecticut woman in 2009.
Claiming he was “Greg” and taking pains to disguise his voice while speaking with Zerzan, Lanza compared “a teenage mall shooter” to Travis the Chimp.
“His attack can be seen entirely parallel to the attacks and random acts of violence that you bring up on your show every week, committed by humans, which the mainstream also has no explanation (for),” Lanza says of Travis at one point.
“I just … don’t think it would be such a stretch to say that he very well could have been a teenage mall shooter or something like that.”
Travis, who appeared in several TV commercials, was shot and killed in Feb. 2009 after he mauled his owner’s friend Charla Nash, in North Stamford, Conn., which is about an hour’s drive from Newtown.
Lanza’s seven-plus minute spiel was delivered in a soft voice and with the precise diction of a psychiatrist. It did not set off any alarms with “Anarchy Radio” host John Zerzan, who is himself a controversial fringe figure – the self-styled guru of the anarcho-primitivist movement that regards technology as a destroyer of society.
Zerzan readily admitted to the Daily News that he remembers Lanza’s call and although the then future killer’s tone was “kind of robotic”, “what he was saying made sense.”
In other words, according to Zerzan, comparing Travis the Face-Mauling chimp to “a teenage mall shooter” makes sense. But the anarcho-primitivist appears to be off-base here. Travis the Mauler snapping because he takes umbrage at being given orders by a woman he apparently doesn’t really know and the carefully planned and executed mass slayings that “teenage mall shooters” seem to specialize in are not really analogous. Even if Travis had felt resentment toward humans previously, it seems unlikely that he conceived of and instigated a well-wrought plan to systematically execute a large group of people who were giving him crap. Rather, he probably just snapped and tore off the poor woman’s face.
Given what we now know about Lanza, which is of course far from complete, it seems unlikely that on the day of the Newtown massacre he merely snapped. Rather, I have the impression that as he resolutely drew up his battle plans, he experienced a sense of inevitability – that with each step forward – it became more and more unlikely that he would turn back. Based on his online forum chats, it’s clear that he is “rational” and “logical” and is fully aware of the subtle level of performance that electronic discourse requires – complete with a carefully selected pseudonym.
But what of Lanza’s peculiar identification with Travis the Mauler? The simple explanation is sometimes the best. Couldn’t it just be something as simple as Lanza identifying with Travis because the damned chimp just wouldn’t take any more shit? It’s a natural desire – not to be ordered around, not to be disrespected. What Travis and Lanza had in common was that they both decided – Travis quickly, Lanza gradually over the course of time – that they were going to attack.
And we see another profound difference between Travis’s apparently instinctual, violent outburst and Lanza’s carefully planned campaign. To complete his planned destruction, notwithstanding his feelings of hurt, anger, rage and the reptilian desire to lash out, Lanza had no choice other than to coldly, systematically and rationally construct his plan – complete with the necessity of suicide to close the circle and eliminate the possibility of any more personal suffering on his part.
* * * * *
Two of Lanza’s former classmates verified that the voice of the video was definitely Lanza’s. 21-year-old Kyle Kromberg has the distinction of having attended three years of Latin class with Lanza at Newtown High School.
“It’s him,” said Kromberg. “I talked to him every day for about an hour each day from freshman to junior year, so I know his voice. He’s a very soft-spoken kid, but very articulate.”
Kromberg, who seems like a good sort, said he and another classmate often made a point of interacting with the extremely introverted Lanza, who would dart out of the classroom as soon as the bell rang.
“As soon as he opened his mouth (in the audio clip), I knew it was him,” said Kromberg. “There’s no voice distinction.”
Another of Lanza’s former high school classmates said that it sounded like Lanza was trying to disguise his voice.
“Yes, I think it’s him,” said the friend, who asked not to be identified. “It does sound like something he would say. But he is talking funny.”
* * * * *
In his call to Zerzan’s show, “Greg” Lanza — who would have disagreed vehemently with my suggestion that Travis was really still a chimpanzee when all was said and done – went to pains to convince Zerzan and whoever else might have been listening that Travis’s lashing out “wasn’t simply because he was a senselessly violent, impulsive chimp.”
“Travis wasn’t an untamed monster at all. Um, he wasn’t just feigning domestication, he was civilized. Um, he was able to integrate into society.”
Lanza pointed out that Travis “was a chimp actor when he was younger.”
“His owner drove him around the city frequently in association with her towing business, where he met many different people, and got along with everyone. If Travis had been some nasty monster all his life it would have been widely reported. But, to the contrary, it seems like everyone who knew him said how shocked they were that Travis had been so savage, because they knew him as a sweet child.”
Lanza claimed that Travis “didn’t really act any differently than a human child would and the people who would use that as an indictment against having chimps live as humans do wouldn’t apply the same thing to humans so it’s just kind of irrelevant.”
(Does the above statement make any sense? Lanza is working very hard to elevate Travis to human status.)
The victim Charla Nash tried to “coax him back into his place of domestication, and he couldn’t handle that, so he attacked her, and anyone else who approached them,” Lanza said. “And dismissing his attack as simply being the senseless violence and impulsiveness of a chimp, instead of a human, is wishful thinking at best.”
Then, somewhat remarkably, Lanza argues that we humans are born into a “chimp-like state”.
“Civilization isn’t something which just happens to gently exist without us having to do anything, because every newborn child — human child — is born in a chimp-like state, and civilization is only sustained by conditioning them for years on end.”
* * * * *
Like any modern young person, the highly cerebral Lanza was a veteran of the online forum and used the alias ‘Smiggles’ when he ventured into chat rooms where mass murder was discussed.
In one forum post he talked about Zerzan’s show prior to calling in to it:
“I’m really surprised that I haven’t been able to find anything he’s written or said about the incident, considering how often he brings up random acts of violence,” Smiggles wrote before calling into the show. “It seems like Travis would be a poster-chimp of his philosophy.”
The self-conscious Lanza critiqued his performance that day after he spoke on the radio show:
“It didn’t go as horribly as I anticipated. I wish that I hadn’t spoken nonstop about Travis for so long, but I didn’t want to seem crazy by randomly bringing up a chimpanzee for unknown reasons.”
Smiggles also critiques his voice:
“I at least sounded less incoherent than usual. I normally speak much softer and swifter, with less articulation, less inflection, and more mumbling.”
Lanza began posting as Smiggles to Shocked Beyond Belief, a fan web site for a video game based on the 1999 massacre of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in Dec. of 2009.
In an Aug. 28, 2011 post, Smiggles had high praise for Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik for topping the bloody handiwork of Woo Bum-kon, the South Korean police officer who killed 56 people and wounded 35 more before killing himself.
According to a police report, Lanza hated being touched. In a Jan. 31, 2011 post on a thread called “body mods”, he hits this jarring note.
“I castrated myself when I was 15 to rebel against society.”
Lanza was so uncomfortable with his own sexuality, that he actually resorts to taking a neo-Marxist stance on a thread entitled “Are you a virgin?” Refusing to answer the personal question, Lanza opted to go on the attack castigating “a degenerate capitalistic system (that) results in a commodification of sexuality.”
“This enables the creation of a cultural notion that premarital sexuality is acceptable. This results in sexuality becoming widespread.”
The perhaps virgin philosopher offered more curious insights on Sept. 6, 2011:
“I used to think I was asexual, but the primary reason why I thought that was because my BMI was 14,” he writes, using the acronym for body mass index.
The painfully thin, 6-foot-tall Lanza, weighed just 114 pounds when he killed himself.
What is missing from the above collection of facts, quotes, and opinions is any explanation as to why Adam Lanza’s rage was such that he conceived of and executed the Sandy Hook massacre. It is possible that as more information comes to light, this question may be, at least tentatively, answered.
The factual information sited in this post is taken from an excellent recent article by Matthew Lysiak, Joe Kemp and Corky Siemaszko, along with Edgar Sandoval and Katie Nelson, of the NY Daily News. The commentary is my own.