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Lisa Zeidner and John Allen Paulos

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From Boxers to Inflationary Universe Hypothesis

By John Allen Paulos
Posted Tuesday, June 29, 1999, at 10:41 AM ET

Hi Lisa,

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Add a dab of gossip, a dollop of policy, whip to a froth and, voilà , a Big Story. Because of its indiscriminate mixing of the personal and the political, one good consequence of the Lewinsky saga may be a greater willingness to distinguish the private from the public. It's hard to say, but that's what seems to have happened with Clinton. The hundred-billion-dollar budget surplus announced yesterday underlines yet again two simultaneous attitudes toward him--not admirable personally, but effective politically. Oddly, people seem to reverse these attitudes when it comes to Gore (as if there were always a negative relationship between personal and public qualities). As I mentioned last time, Maureen Dowd wrote last week that he was so feminized he was almost lactating. It's interesting that the comment attracted none of the reproach that a middle-school baseball coach did recently for requiring players who committed several fielding errors to wear bras and panties outside their uniforms.

Speaking of underwear and the distinction between private and public brings to mind the famous boxers-or-briefs question posed to Clinton early in his presidency. And, of course, even this Breakfast Table forum tends to blur the distinction. Separating what should be private from what should be public is easier said than done, however. If something private becomes public for whatever reason, not fully examining it seems wrong and thus something's being public seems to imply that it should be so. Maybe something shouldn't become public, but if it does happen to become so, it should be so. Doesn't quite rise to the level of a paradox, but it's close.

This reminds me of the reigning theory in cosmology. The inflationary universe hypothesis holds--very, very roughly--that an infinitesimal fraction of a second after the Big Bang, tiny parts of the primordial universe inflated so fast that all of our visible universe derives from one of them; we can't see the rest of the universe. The metaphor is strained (in fact I just developed carpal tunnel syndrome typing it), but the inflationary universe idea reminds me of what happens when something private becomes public. It expands so fast as to distort and define the Global Media Village ever after.

Well, Lisa, what thinkst thou of things Clintonian or of the personal-public stew? Any alternative recipes or novelistic insights?

From the cusp,
John