Make Love, Not War Poem by gershon hepner

“Make love, not war, ” said Gershon Legman,
but if a girl should make him beg, man
will end up making war, and not
the love that Legman loved a lot.

Inspired by an article by Mary Beard on laughter in the July 17,2008 edition of NYR, reviwing two books on the subject, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, by Jim Holt, and Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture,100 BC-AD-250, by John R. Clarke.Beard points out that laughter is also performed by exhalation, which suggests to me that it denotes exhalation of the spirit just as sex, denoted by the same word in Hebrew, sahaq, denotes extravasation of seed. She also points out that the slogan “Make Love, Not War, ” was invented by Gershon Legman, book-sourcer for Alfred Kinsey and author of The Dirty Joke and its companion volume that is even dirtier, No Laughing Matter.

6/30/08