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Lisa Zeidner and John Allen Paulos

the breakfast table:
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When Not to Flip the Bird

By John Allen Paulos
Posted Monday, June 28, 1999, at 5:12 PM ET

Hi, Lisa,

RSS

Ah, yes, more linkages. I remember said writer. And am I mistrustful of all anecdotal evidence? Yes. Dismissive of it? No. Not shooting people the bird does seem, however, like a good idea whether the other driver is a housewife in a Suburban or not and whether careful statistical studies have been done to support this no-birding policy or not.

Am I alienated from the global village? Well, being so seems almost a necessary condition of having a personality and point of view. The world, as we're always being told, is a quite diverse chowchow of cultures and subcultures and vocations and ethnic groups and on and on, and anyone who could feel comfortable with even a fraction of them would be unrecognizable as a human being. Think of those morphed faces that partake of every race and ethnicity and imagine the traits and beliefs of such beings to be similar amalgams of the world's peoples. Better to suffer a little alienation than be such an entity.

We're back again to personal concerns and issues and more social ones and how, increasingly it seems, they intermingle. Even this form, the electronic Breakfast Table, illustrates this non-kosher mixing. To an extent it is supposed to be a private e-mail correspondence about the day's news. On the other hand it's accessible to all of Slate's eager readers in Kazakhstan.

But blowing up a semi-private exchange to a semi-public one changes it. Different rules apply. This is part of the problem with Gore. His good-guy personal traits are being read as ineffective public ones. Last week Maureen Dowd wrote that he was so feminized that he was positively lactating. I have problems with that on several levels, but they can wait for tomorrow.

As always,
John

P.S. Monday's papers do often seem dull. Sunday isn't a big day for news-makers or news-breakers.