Two Lanzas, Two Americas

SOLO-International Op-Ed: Two Lanzas, Two Americas

Lindsay Perigo

Three generations ago, in 1950, handsome young tenor Mario Lanza was King of the Airwaves, with his ballad, Be My Love, sitting atop the pop charts, as secure as his High C, for 34 weeks and soaring out from jukeboxes everywhere. Its lyrics were these:

Be my love, for no one else can end this yearning
This need that you and you alone create
Just fill my arms the way you fill my dreams
The dreams that you inspire
With every sweet desire,
Be my love and with your kisses set me burning
One kiss is all I need to seal my fate
And hand in hand we'll find love's promised land
There'll be no one but you for me, eternally
If you will be my love.

Lanza was to duplicate this triumph in short order with The Loveliest Night of the Year and Because You're Mine. His 1951 bio-pic, The Great Caruso, was to enjoy runaway success and confound the sceptics who had insisted the opera-laden project was doomed from the start.

In 1995, Florence King was to reminisce, in National Review:

Those presently engaged in a Diogenean search for heroes should stop and reflect that Lanza was the only person in the history of the world to succeed in elevating teenage musical tastes. He did it, moreover, without creating snobs. Although my generation were products of a decade notorious for status-seeking, having a crush on an opera singer pointed us toward the higher goal of self-improvement. Inspired by girlish passion, we earned our status the old-fashioned way: we "bettered" ourselves. ... Our entertainment is now so debased that it will take more than election-year growls from Bob Dole to set it right. We have carried egalitarianism to such a maniacal extreme that we now regard beauty as an affront. The national anthem must be sung at ballgames by tone-deaf croakers, and actresses with classical faces have been replaced by cross-eyed Karen Black and pop-eyed Susan Sarandon.

In December, 2012, the "song" currently at the top of the charts is called Die Young. It is "sung" by an adenoidal airhead with a ring in her nose, a creature calling herself Ke$ha. Visuals change every nano-second, in deference to contemporary attention spans. They show the "singer" being licked and fondled by writhing young men ... after which everyone gets shot.
Here are the lyrics:
I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums
Oh, what a shame that you came here with someone
So while you're here in my arms
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young
We're gonna die young
We're gonna die young
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young
Young hearts, out our minds
Running 'til we outta time
Wild child's lookin' good
Living hard just like we should
Don't care who's watching when we tearing it up (You Know)
That magic that we got nobody can touch (For sure)
Looking for some trouble tonight (yeah)
Take my hand, I'll show you the wild, side
Like it's the last night of our lives (uh huh)
We'll keep dancing 'til we die
I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums
Oh, what a shame that you came here with someone
So while you're here in my arms,
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young
We're gonna die young
We're gonna die young
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young
Young hunks, taking shots
Stripping down to dirty socks
Music up, gettin' hot
Kiss me, give me all you've got
It's pretty obvious that you've got a crush (you know)
That magic in your pants, it's making me blush (for sure)
Looking for some trouble tonight (yeah)
Take my hand, I'll show you the wild side
Like it's the last night of our lives (uh huh)
We'll keep dancing 'til we die
I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums
Oh, what a shame that you came here with someone
So while you're here in my arms,
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young
I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums
Oh, what a shame that you came here with someone
So while you're here in my arms
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young
We're gonna die young
We're gonna die young
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young.

On December 14, 2012, it's not Mario Lanza whose name is on everyone's lips, but 20-year-old Adam Lanza (no relation) -- for indeed dying young, by his own hand, after shooting his mother and then a further twenty-six people, adults and children, at his old elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. This, hard on the heels of a murderous rampage in a Portland, Oregon, shopping mall by 22-year-old Jacob Tyler Roberts, who also shot himself (December 11). This, not so long after a mass murder in a Colorado movie theatre by 25-year-old James Holmes, who didn't shoot himself and is currently awaiting trial. This, eighteen months after 22-year-old Jared Loughner opened fire on an open-air meeting being held by Representative Gabby Giffords, killing six and gravely injuring the Congresswoman. This, four years after 23-year-old Seung Hui Cho went to the campus Virginia Polytechnic, where he was a student, and killed 32 people before killing himself. Lots of dying young going on.

Now, I'm not claiming to know what specifically drove these young men to commit their atrocities. I am reiterating what I've claimed on countless occasions previously: from a psychotic culture you will get psychotic outcomes. And a psychotic culture is what you'll get from a society in which airheads preponderate. And, in a society that is subjected to decades of Comprachico-ism via Progressivism, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci-ism, Alinskyism, Political Correctness, Pomowankery, etc., etc., airheads will sooner or later preponderate.

The Airhead is The Comprachicoed One: "an impotent creature, unable to think, unable to face or deal with reality, a creature who combines brashness and fear, who can recite its memorized lessons, but cannot understand them -- a creature deprived of its means of survival, doomed to limp or stumble or crawl through life in search of some nameless relief from a chronic, nameless, incomprehensible pain." (One of Rand's descriptions of the Comprachicoed.) Airheads include "the half-illiterate college freshmen who are unable to read a book (in the sense of understanding its content as opposed to looking at its pages) or to write a paper or to spell -- or even to speak coherently, which is caused by the inability to organize their thoughts, if any." (Ditto.)

In America, airheads do now preponderate, as shown by the re-election of their poster-filth and the type of filth that dominates the pop charts. It is now Airhead America, incubator of psychoses and murderous rampages.

It's not the guns. 77 million Americans own guns and don't go on murderous rampages (though many more undoubtedly will, in Airhead America). In Mario Lanza's time there were virtually no restrictions on gun ownership at all. Murderous rampages were much less common than now. Stricter gun laws are not the answer, though assuredly Obamarx, The Anti-American President, will now gleefully lead an assault on the Second Amendment.

It's not the slutification of women, as Doug Bandler argues, though slutification is doubtless a very real effect of airheadery's triumph. As best we can tell, none of the rampagers had a problem with women (or a woman) in particular; rather with humanity and life in general. (One of the travesties spawned by Airhead America is that women who are not airheads or sluts feel constrained to behave as though they are: witness the likes of Kimberley Guilfoyle and other Fox News women presenters who wear no clothes and quack like retarded ducks in lieu of speaking.)

It's not Blacks and Hispanics, though their collectivist cultural baggage with its supremacy of the pack makes them easy prey for the Comprachicos. Airheadery is not a racial phenomenon, and there are many admirable Blacks and Hispanics at the forefront of resistance to it.

It's not the absence of Gobby (God) from public life, as Goblians are claiming. All of the above schools of "thought" are, much more than they are anti-religion, anti-reason. Reverting to superstitious goblin-worship is not the answer. Fixing reason firmly on her throne, in Jefferson's words, is.

We are witnessing the climax of cretinism, the zenith of zombie-ism, the apogee of airheadery, precisely because of the concerted attack on reason from all sides. The plunge from Mario Lanza to Ke$ha -- and far worse headbanging caterwauling than hers -- is testament to the anti-reasonists' success. The contrasting symbolism of Mario Lanza and Adam Lanza is testament to the enormity of the anti-reasonists' destruction. No, millions don't worship Adam the way millions once worshipped Mario -- but millions embrace a culture that glorifies the kind of deed Adam Lanza recently perpetrated.

Objectivists who kid themselves that simply reiterating the moral case for free markets is sufficient to counter this calamity and avert its attendant cataclysm are ... well, kidding themselves. Private enterprise television executives are among the lowest of the filth contributing to the collapse of the culture, for one thing. No, television shouldn't be nationalized and these executives should not be criminalized, but they are guilty of crimes against humanity and should be comprehensively shamed and repudiated.
Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, who do an inspiring job of reiterating the moral case for free markets in their new book, Free Market Revolution, concede at the end of their sterling effort that "our odds are slim" -- but possibly greater than the Founding Fathers' odds. Well, the Founding Fathers went to war. The "abuses and usurpations" they cited in doing so are dwarfed by those occurring in the sacrificialist sewer that is Airhead America, meaning the case for going to war again is unassailable. This time, of course, it would not be a war against England, but neither would it be a Civil War; it would not be Americans vs Americans, but Americans vs anti-Americans, Patriots vs Airheads. Watkins and Brook say they, like the Founding Fathers, are prepared to "put everything on the line." Presumably they mean by that their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Do they really mean that? Are there enough fellow-Patriots to make it viable?

One would hope it won't come to that, but in the absence of a revolution, peaceful or otherwise, America will consolidate its status as Airhead America, cogently emblemized by Adam Lanza and not at all by Mario.

Lindsay Perigo: linz@lindsayperigo.com
SOLO (Sense of Life Objectivists): SOLOPassion.com

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