Performance Anxiety Poem by gershon hepner

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY


The North Koreans moved from blast-off to a bloomin' blast
that turned them all into a laughing-stock.
I hope this won't occur with me, so I, enduring, last
beyond my blast-off, with a cocky cock
that doesn't prematurely fade with the anxiety
performance brings on, as we're told by Harold,
the blooming eminence of literary society,
disappearing, as if Lewis Carrolled.
In the wonderland of sex this bloke will never be
a blunderbuss who can't perform his task.
He will discharge with missile chic, not chinoiserie,
his rocket, and in praises always bask.

Inspired by an article by William J Broad ("North Korea's Performance Anxiety, " NYT,5/6/12) :

"IT'S a boy, " Edward Teller exulted after the world's first hydrogen bomb exploded in 1952 with a force 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. From the start, the nuclear era seethed with sexual allusions. Military officers joked about the phallic symbolism of their big missiles and warheads — and of emasculating the enemy. "Dr. Strangelove" mocked the idea with big cigars and an excited man riding into the thermonuclear sunset with a bomb tucked between his legs.
Helen Caldicott, the antinuclear activist, argued in the 1980s that male insecurity accounted for the cold war's perilous spiral of arms. Her book? "Missile Envy." Today, the psychosexual lens helps explain why North Korea, in addition to dire poverty and other crippling woes, faces international giggles over its inability to "get it up" — a popular turn of phrase among bloggers and some headline writers.
"Things like this never go away, " Spencer R. Weart, an atomic historian and director emeritus of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, said in an interview. "There's little doubt that missiles are phallic symbols. Everybody agrees on that."
On Friday, April 13, North Korea fired a big rocket on a mission to loft the nation's first satellite into orbit. But it fell back to Earth with a splash. The flop was the latest in 14 years of fizzles and outright failures in North Korea's efforts to conduct showy tests of its long-range missiles and atom bombs. The blunders have damaged its military image and raised its profile among late-night comedians.
Arms controllers, more comfortable with technical minutiae than erotic imagery, nevertheless concede that North Korea now most likely stews with worries akin to those that can accompany sexual failure. "It must be incredibly stressful, " noted Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He called it "performance anxiety."

5/6/12 #10,093