The Psychology of Jeeps and Guns: Hum Drum v Heroic Life

Mankind cannot bear too much reality.
--T.S. Eliot

A Wall Street Journal review (Dan Neil) of a new Jeep Wrangler which has the power of a small bulldozer was titled "Purposeless Power"  but on line it was called "Superhero looking for a Mission" and it began with this wonderful opening:

 SOME CARS spend their lives waiting to be a hero. The average Lamborghini can go 200 mph but most of the time it just sits there in the garage, reeking depreciation. But on that one special night when you have to get your pregnant wife, or girlfriend, or both, to the ospedale in a hurry, the Lambo stands up like a boss.

Those lift-kit pickups belching diesel smoke and whomping down the highway on 36-inch beadlocks? Useless. But when Houston flooded, hundreds of those explicitly stupid vehicles suddenly looked brilliant, wading filthy waters to rescue stranded residents.

The click and clack brothers of "Car Talk" (Tom and Ray Magliozzi) used to send up a howl whenever anyone would call in with a problem about his Jeep. "Oh, what a beast!" they'd groan. "Why would you want to drive down a road in that? Do you ever go off road?"

Fact is, I lusted after a Jeep for years, for reasons I never examined, but when I actually faced the reality and went into the dealership and test drove it, it was stiff, uncomfortable, noisy and I was hauling kids to wrestling tournaments and a minivan was much more to the point. Never got my Jeep.

The Jeep is all about fantasy, and that fantasy goes back to pre rational years, when I was maybe five or six watching WWII movies and all the soldiers rode around in Jeeps and they were so attached to them, they were like horses, something living, as the famous Bill Mauldin cartoon depicted, showing the weeping GI administering the coup de grace to a dying Jeep.

The same thing is clearly true for gun owners, particularly the guy who owns a small arsenal of AR-15's. They are just waiting for that day they can grab that gun and be a hero, race down to the school and confront the bad guy, take him out, or better yet, be ready to rally with friends and defeat the faceless bad guys in blue helmets descending in black helicopters to take over America.

The TV series "Homeland" has a wonderful sequence where an Alex Jones type character, a radio alt right guy who says things like, "When your sexually ambiguous, transgender friends sipping their five dollar lattes face the hobnail booted armies of the New World Order, marching to the orders of the Deep State, they're gonna be goddamned glad a few red blooded patriots buried some of those AR-15's in their backyards and rallied to the stars and stripes and laid down a field of fire so they could escape," this guy called Brett O'Keefe is holed up in a farmhouse, protected by a gun toting like minded family and when the FBI surrounds the place, gun toting friends arrive to defend freedom and there is a Waco like shoot out. A blaze of glory.
Barack Obama cut a certain clan of American manhood to the quick when he described these white males as "clinging to their guns and their religion" and that juxtaposition was important because what he was saying, is they are pathetic because they are clinging to fantasies, which is what religion is and of what the guns are the most visible emblem.

So that's what this gun thing is all about. The boys are playing super hero and they get really angry when you try to take their guns away and they don't care if the monthly slaughter of innocents in school hallways, movie theaters, shopping malls or concerts continues, because if you take away their fantasies, their secret super hero lives, then what do they have left?