North Korean Diplomacy and ED

                                                           David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

Who ever thought that ED would ever become a factor in North Korean diplomacy or that Dr. Ruth might be suggested as a special envoy to the newly chosen successor to Kim Jong-il, his son Kim Jong-un? This was the substance of New York Times science reporter William Broad’s recent piece in the Sunday Review section of the paper (“North Korea’s Performance Anxiety,” NYT, 5/5/12). “Today, the psychosexual lens helps explain why North Korea, in addition to dire poverty and other crippling woes, faces international giggles over it inability to ‘get it up,’” Broad comments about North Korea’s recent failed missile launch. Later he writes, “A psychoanalyst might see the shift from a blast off to a blast as weird kind of substitute gratification.” Plainly the North Koreans are not practicing the kind of sensate focus techniques that Masters and Johnson proposed in response to impotence problems. Under the theory that the naked will is useless in sexual matters, the Masters and Johnson approach involves taking the focus off the erection. Then there are the drugs like Viagra and Cialis which are used to take care of the physiological aspect of ED. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that psychology alone may not explain the problems the North Korean’s have been experiencing. “A move to highly enriched uranium—or a mixture of the two bomb fuels known as a composite core—would let North Korea expand its ways of shaking the earth and perhaps, one day, of mounting warheads atop missiles to intimidate neighbors.” Kinsey was the Clausewitz of sexology and were he still alive today Harvard professor Samuel Huntington could easily have been called the Masters and Johnson of international affairs. But it’s unclear if either Clausewitz or Masters and Johnson, more or less Brezezinski or Shere Hite could find a solution to North Korea’s particular brand of dysfunction.

The Namesake

Anyone with a name like Vercingetorix is born to be a conquerer. It’s like Douglas MacArthur or Erwin Rommel, aka the Desert Fox. Beowulf is a name that connotes the war-like spirit, as does General McChrystal, whose name evokes something tangible yet precious. Ataturk is another name that produces a martial effect, as does Bismarck, though Clausewitz, who argued that war is a form of diplomacy, is a name that sounds incongruously effete for someone who advocated Genghis Khan-like pillage. On the other hand, Alexander Haig, Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, doesn’t sound like the name of a general, even though he was one. Alexander Haig is more like the name of an expensive Madison Avenue optometrist. On the other hand, Nixon’s secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, may not have been a general, but he sure looked like one. Laird scared you, just like Sterling Hayden’s Jack D. Ripper did in Dr. Strangelove. The My Lai Massacre needed Calley, just as the Iran-Contra affair needed Oliver North, but those names are lacking the teeth of the hyena, Esau’s furry arms, or the mane of the Lion King. Circumstances made those military men, but they were not warriors like General Patton or David Petraeus, whose calm is mirrored by his title—Head of the U.S. Military’s Central Command. You can almost imagine his stationary, which has got to be an eye-stopper. Colin Powell seems to be cut from similar cloth. If he’d been a surgeon, his procedures would have been done laparoscopically, unlike the marauding Taras Bulba. And even when Ulysses Grant was a little boy, it was obvious there was always going to be a tomb named after him. Sherman and Lee opposed each other, but they both had tanks named in their honor, such was their parity. Their names come to a natural standoff, like the Monitor and the Miramax. Hannibal rhymes with cannibal (say no more), and Dwight D. Eisenhower was nicknamed “Ike,” which rhymes with pike, a reassuringly quaint implement of war. He married Mamie, but turned out be be as much of a swordsman off the battlefield as he was when he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe.

Ordinary Pain

You are speeding along by yourself on an Interstate when a really great song like Stevie Wonder’s Love’s In Need of Love Today comes on, and you turn the sound up as loud as it will go.

    

What is a nice guy or girl? Cordelia wasn’t nice because she didn’t say what Lear wanted to hear. Goneril is definitely not nice. Oracles are not nice. Soothsayers like Calchas are not nice. The Sphinx is not nice in Oedipus because it only proposes riddles. You have to go through hoops to answer what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?

  

Lionel Trilling dealt with this subject in a series of essays called “Sincerity and Authenticity.” But what do these terms really connote? Are the Cordelias of the world better than the Gonerils, or are they merely seeking another kind of gain, i.e., martyrdom and moral superiority? One way to get ahead in the world might be to ask for things, another might be to propose self-deprivation. Though Augustine repudiated earthly desires, he made it (by the worldly standard of fame). Gandhi had a good run of success, as did philosophical kindred like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who used passive resistance to achieve their aims. Is the man of peace better than the warrior? Is Mother Theresa saintly in comparison to Clausewitz, who argued that war was merely “the continuation of politics”? We are all imperialists, both on ontogenic and phylogenic levels. We all want to control and dominate, whether it’s a person, a class, or a society of people. Was Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik fundamentally more evil than the politics of conciliation that might be advocated by organizations of doves?

   

So is it all a matter of presentation, The Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life that Erving  Goffman described in his famed sociological tome. Is it all public relations? Is personality a series of conscious and unconscious decisions with a pubic face, but no moral scorecard?

   

Now you are speeding down the same highway and Freyda Payne’s disco classic Band of Gold comes on the oldies station.