The Masons: They'll make you such a deal

Poor Masons. Apparently they're so hard-up for membership that they're actively recruiting- and relaxing their membership requirements.

But the Masons’ numbers have been steadily dwindling — whatever their secrets are, they apparently do not have one for avoiding death — and their ranks have been graying. So the New York State Masons have followed other state Masonic societies in doing something that they would have once considered heretical: they are actively reaching out for new members. And, in the process, a famously reticent fraternal organization that now puts a premium on its community service has lifted its veil of secrecy just a bit. ...the Masons are giving public tours of the New York
Grand Lodge Headquarters.

You know, I'm sure there was an issue of "Justice League" or "Superfriends" that went like that: "And here, Timmy, is the doomsday device."

"Wow, Batman! Can I press it?"

"Don't be retarded, Timmy. Stupid kids won't be accepted as Junior Members."

"Aww, but you let Aqua-Lad in!"

The lodge also hired a public relations firm to spread the word about its 225th anniversary, which was last month.

First, public relations firm, no. Second, this firm obviously dropped the ball, because usually you're supposed to let people know about anniversaries BEFORE they happen. That's like if people spread the word about the bicentennial in November.

And the Masons have run advertisements in movie theaters and run one-day classes to award the first three Masonic degrees in a single session. Until then, would-be Masons had to spend months learning what they needed to know to rise from Entered Apprentice to Fellowcraft to Master Mason.

“We’re still not thinking of it as recruiting or trying to amass people,” said Thomas M. Savini, the director of the library at the New York Grand Lodge Headquarters, on West 23rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas, “but I think we’ve reached a point where we realized that not saying anything isn’t making it any easier.”
They had also reached a point where they could not ignore what others were saying about them in “The Da Vinci Code” and other bestsellers like “The Book of Fate” by Brad Meltzer. “What ‘The Da Vinci Code’ gave us was an opportunity to say, ‘Here’s what we are,’” Mr. Savini said.

Man, we Jews totally should have done that after "The Passion". "Next week's sermon: Jews- it's been a long time since we spoke Aramaic and covertly denounced crazed would-be Messiahs God made flesh."

Now, I don't know how to feel about this. The penny-pinching Shylock in me is rubbing his stingy, almost crablike pincers together at the thought of getting a master mason degree in only one class- that might almost make up for not going to grad school- but then I came across this:

Geometry is but one of the seven liberal arts. A Mason who could not remember the other six would need only to look up, for they are written on the ceiling: arithmetic, rhetoric, logic, grammar, music and astronomy. The four cardinal virtues — ortitude, prudence, temperance and justice — are written there, too.

Never mind, I'm out.

The best part of all this is that the Masons still aren't accepting women, which makes total sense- after all, there's desperate and then there's, well... desperate.