Safety in Numbers

Lisa Zeidner

that old paradox-they're popular:
 nothing succeeds like success.
 Three men in a tub, thirty men
 in a phone booth, all you can eat,
 presents heaped under the tree:

 more is usually merrier;
 though they say clichés get that way
 by being fresh originally,
 the first cause is more often than not
 the response and not the stimulus.

 Gape at blank sky
 until you get a following
 for a tried-and-true demonstration
 of how the emperor went naked
 and of the Third Reich.

 By the law of averages,
 bounty must entail conformity.
 We're all the smartest kid in the class,
 a party of one, a bandwagon
 of first kids on the block.

 It's mandatory, for instance,
 to mistrust a generalization,
"blonds have more fun" being, after all,
 an Aryan sentiment, even supported
 by (doubtless rigged) statistics.

 Our unilateral insistence
 on going against the grain
 is glorified sibling rivalry: our heroes
 identically outwit hoards of Nazis
 and Turks with one-track minds

 to fulfill our fantasy
 of the blessedness of only children
 (how much attention Jesus got!),

 a union of Lone Rangers who know
 that all beds are Procrustean,

 all designer dresses
 have other women in them.
 Democracy is also a tyranny.
 It cancels, equalizes controversy.
"Very nice, dear," it says

 to all its children
 like an indulgent mother who lives
 in a shoe and hangs everyone's art
 on the refrigerator.
 If, as Blake says, "to generalize

 is to be an idiot,"
 then that generalization is idiotic
 (let Blake eat raw pork), as is
 the contention that it's no better
 to rob Ma Bell than to rob

 a Mom-and-Pop store,
 no less heinous to kill one man
 than to kill a million-
 to begin, it takes more bullets.
 The point is we're still counting.

 We wouldn't hurt a fly and we pick up
 the tab, but we keep tabs
 on our tolerance, our generosity.
 The Taoists, who advise us
 to leap into the infinite

 and make it our home, must realize
 that once the boundless is a home
 you can't vacation there;
 the boundless then has doors, a mortgage,
 an acreage larger or smaller


than the Joneses'; though a home
isn't always a house and though you can't
please all the people all the time,
the odds are good
that the boundless is best visited.

The rest of the time, ceilings
not only keep down the heating bill
but provide a satisfying known variable
against which to assess
the real mysteries, like love or cancer.

There's safety, in short, not only
in numbers, but in the numbers of those
who oppose the safety of numbers
and even in the ranks of devil's advocacy-
each way, you're in good company.