Safety in Numbers

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.