Freud is my Co-Pilot

My father was a career Air Force officer and fighter pilot. He flew P-51 Mustangs in Europe during WW II, F-86's in Korea, and most of the post war era jet fighters up to F-106 Delta Dart interceptors when he retired in 1963.

He also liked to collect guns. More accurately, he liked hunting, and collected guns principally in the service of the sport of hunting the large American game animals he was fond of eating, generally mule deer and elk and pronghorn antelope. He was a skilled hunter and well respected among those who knew him for both his philosophy and ability. Hunting was for him a test of manhood and he had contempt for hunters who did not cultivate and master the principles of tracking, stalking, and killing animals with a single shot to the neck. He did not hunt fowl and didn't own a shotgun. The only exception I recall occurred while we were stationed in Ankara, Turkey in 1961, and he was invited by some of the other officers to go goose hunting. They gave him a hard time when he brought his rifle until he shot a goose, on the fly, through the base of the neck, with his .306. I am not making this up, I saw the goose.

So what does this have to do with Freud? Because Freud identified guns as symbols of the male phallus, for obvious reasons. This is not to indict hunters in general or my father in particular, he had no fetish or obsession with guns, it's just that guns are often regarded as powerful symbols of the male sex organ.

Symbols, certainly, but powerful?

Consider for a moment . . .

the jet fighter:

It's a huge, long, rigid, metal cylinder.

It's moving forward with tremendous power and velocity.

The whole thing is vibrating like crazy.

The pilot is holding the stick, another long, rigid cylinder . . .

between his legs.

It's vibrating too.

To control the plane, he must continually squeeze and manipulate the stick.

His objective is to approach another aircraft from behind,

and at the climax of his pursuit, he must squeeze the stick in just the right way

to make stuff shoot out of the end of his plane

into the the the hot, round opening in the rear of the other plane.

Holy freakin' moly.

An F-16 is a just twenty million dollar vibrator.

copyright © 2002 Dan Manthos