‘Rhetoric and the Columbians’ historic membership growth’

    

The Knights of Columbus, the fraternal service order of the Roman Catholic Church, announced recent growth in membership that pushes its enrollment past 2.1 million worldwide, says its senior officer. If this is accurate, and if I’m not mistaken, they now are larger than all Masonic regular grand lodges combined, as the United States accounts for fewer than 900,000 Masons.

Patrick E. Kelly

At their 142nd Supreme Convention, held in Quebec last Tuesday, Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly said 92,000 men joined during the past year, making it “one of our best years of growth in a century,” according to La Croix International, a Catholic news source based in France. “In these challenging times, our mission matters. We must start by building up a new generation of Catholic men—men formed in faith and virtue; men prepared to be missionary disciples.”

And that is where it becomes impossible to contrast their gross gain to Freemasonry’s net losses, because the Columbians rally around their church and doctrine, while Freemasons consistently remain confused or uninformed of who they fundamentally are. However, those two states of consciousness produce dissimilar messaging which we can juxtapose:

Freemasonry: 2B1ASK1

Columbians: “Knights come from every stage of life, in countless corners of the world. Join us as we celebrate real role models in a world that needs men who lead, serve, protect, and defend.”

Freemasonry: We make good men better.

Columbians: “No matter what stage you are in your life, we are all on a journey together. Join us as role models in a world that needs men who lead, serve, protect, and defend.”

Freemasonry: Not just a man. A Mason.

Columbians: “You are a key part in bringing a culture of faith to life in your home, council, community, or parish. Let the Knights help you.”

Freemasonry: Where men build meaning.

Columbians: “There is nothing more effective at evangelizing the culture, than regular, everyday people choosing to live their faith in their homes, councils, community, and parish.”

Obviously, Freemasons cannot speak to any particular religious faith, because we are not a religion or an adjunct of any religion, but it is the pride that shines through the Knights’ words that grabs me. They sound assertive, specific, unflinching. We speak timidly in empty phrases from marketing consultants who have no understanding of who we are, because they’ve been hired by leaders who don’t know either.

Furthermore, Freemasonry is tongue tied by a misunderstanding of our own prohibitions of discussing religion and politics. We are enjoined from arguing over sectarian differences and partisan politics, but we can talk ideas. I’ll avoid the word philosophy, because that frightens some of the brethren, but we, as Free and Accepted Masons, may exchange views, impart wisdom, and uphold truth.

We speak of virtue and morality. We too can speak to leadership and service, to protecting and defending.

Coming next week.

The Lafayette bicentenary is upon us; the anniversary of his arrival in New York is days off. Freemasonry is commemorating this, but does anyone not named Chris Ruli know precisely what we’re celebrating?

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is twenty-three months away. Are we preparing a jubilee for Americanism, a salute to the Freemasons, famous and obscure alike, who risked life and liberty to establish our country? Will we trumpet their ideas, or would doing so mean PoLiTics? 

At the rate I’m going, I can’t say when I’ll finish it, but for months I’ve been drafting a speech that borrows from Masonic oratory of previous generations to portray how Masons once viewed their fraternity, and thereby maybe help today’s brethren find the confidence to talk about the tenets of our Craft. Unlike the Knights of Columbus, Freemasonry cannot speak of any particular sectarian beliefs, but we do speak of God, and we should voice our universal message for free minds and free societies. Masonry has no canonized saints, but we do have our civic heroes who exemplified these concepts, as expressed in various speeches a hundred years ago:

▪︎ Freemasonry is a college of manhood.

▪︎ Its lodges are moral republics and centers of law and order.

▪︎ We offer a sanctuary of friendship and a school for liberty.

▪︎ Masonry is a voluntary league for the promotion of freedom and virtue.

▪︎ We inculcate the principles of equality, the necessity of law, and the excellence of order in all things.

Sensible people who pay attention to life realize we are stumbling through frightening times. Historically, there always have been scary things happening, but today too many institutions we once trusted are corrupted and the social customs that guided us are perverted. We are eyewitnesses to reality being contorted and made nonsensical all day, every day.

‘Rhetoric,’ per the Grand Lodge of New York.

In his Daily Masonic Progress essay today on Substack, titled “Why Freemasons Must Study Rhetoric,” Bro. Darren Allatt writes:

Why does Freemasonry instruct us to study Rhetoric, one of the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences? This ancient discipline, respected by great thinkers throughout history, holds the power to transform not only our communication but our very thought processes.

Click here.

As Masons, we are called to improve ourselves in all aspects of life. But how does mastering Rhetoric contribute to this journey and what wisdom can we uncover from this timeless art?

In today’s fast-paced world, the art of effective communication is more crucial than ever. Yet many of us, Masons included, often overlook the importance of Rhetoric in our personal and professional lives. This oversight leads to missed opportunities for growth, influence, and understanding. Without a grasp of Rhetoric, we may find ourselves struggling to express our ideas clearly, persuade others, or fully understand the messages around us.

Decent men are looking for stability, order, real equality, virtue, morality, freedom, and manhood. For everybody’s sake, Freemasons ought to be as unapologetically bold and clear in speaking the truth as are our neighbors in the Knights of Columbus. The kind of man we seek will respond.

     

‘Where Men Build Meaning’

   

It’s been available in a limited way online since Grand Lodge met two weeks ago, but last Wednesday the Where Men Build Meaning video was uploaded to YouTube. This advertisement on Grand Lodge’s Our Quarry channel aims to encapsulate—to borrow from Wilmshurst—the meaning of Masonry. Not easily done in two minutes.

The title is too opaque for my tastes. Freemasonry is a very specific and highly stylized thing. Then again, two minutes isn’t a lot of time, and a promotional video isn’t necessarily the place to venture too deep.

But it’s okay.

My problem with any such video is in how it speaks to existing Freemasons at least as much as it does to the public we want to meet. Still, this one surpasses the “Scottish Rite NMJ” message, which is self-congratulatory pap.

“Honey? Look at this. See? I’m not just a man. I’m a Mason!” “Congratulations. Now take out the garbage.”

So maybe there will be future videos from Our Quarry that might speak to more than making friends with a nod to the Principal Tenets. It’s hard. I understand. (I’ve always scoffed at the “elevator pitch.”) And I’m not knocking the making friends part, knowing that study after study documents how men, young and middle aged alike, are meandering through life friendless, with the predictable consequences. But the apt messaging exists. We have the Standard Work and Lectures. We have centuries of literature to mine.

Check out what Vermont recently produced.

     

‘Not just a tagline. Truth.’

     

‘Antiquior Montibus Est Veritas’ is the Grand Lodge of Vermont’s motto, and appears on its seal. It translates to ‘Truth Is Older Than the Mountains,’ perfect for the Green Mountain State.

Being at labor in a lodge named Publicity, I take notice of the various advertising gambits undertaken here and there in this fraternity. The most active is the United Grand Lodge of England, which employs young media professionals to shape messaging, keep social media buzzing, and deliver rebuttal to adverse claims against Freemasonry. Their needs are more difficult than ours in America, where achieving basic public awareness is the primary challenge.

The splashiest effort these past five years has been the “Scottish Rite” NMJ’s “Not Just a Man. a Mason.” campaign by Cercone Brown Company. I’ve never been in advertising, so I can’t render a professional critique of it, but I don’t think the tagline says anything, and I was put off by the initial ad which shows a slightly demented looking guy sporting four days of growth on his face and attired in an undershirt. I’m told that’s what the NMJ leadership thinks is cool or contemporary, which it very well might be, but if this guy arrived at my lodge, where I’m tiler, looking like that, I’d advise him to return another night when he is feeling better. I found their follow-up ads vague and timid. But enough about them.

The Grand Lodge of Vermont is the latest to attempt promotional media, having launched its “Truth Is Older Than the Mountains” campaign last month. I like it. It leans toward the erudite and profound, and it is tied to local heritage. That was the approach I pushed for when promulgating a media/public relations handbook for “New Jersey Freemasonry” twenty-something years ago. (They weren’t interested, but somehow New York’s PR chairman obtained a copy, and put his name on it.) Again, I’m not an expert, but that is the direction I still would chart now if spending money and staking reputation on the effort.

The Green Mountain State is sparsely populated, at about 645,000 people, approximately 60 percent of whom are between 18 and 65 years of age, and half of those are male. So they’re aiming for a market of 129,000 men. And their ads are running on Facebook, which I take to indicate they are not pursuing 18-year-olds, and instead prefer the 40+ set.

Last week they launched a podcast. Episode 1 features Chris Murphy discussing the history of Freemasonry in Vermont. “Freemasonry and Vermont have a lot in common,” says Murphy, referring to the character of citizens and of Masons as people who cherish their individual liberty yet remain bonded by all they share in common. Unlike the majority of Masons’ podcasts I’ve sampled, this shows professionalism and is pleasant to hear.

It seems to me the Grand Lodge is appealing to a specific demographic, rather than seeing which feint might trick the most men into a mass initiation.

The Grand Lodge of Vermont is comprised of maybe approximately 4,000 Masons now. I really think the second quarter of the twenty-first century will see the sunsetting of the smaller grand lodges. There always will be Freemasonry, but I bet Vermont will see lodges regroup into smaller federations or perhaps receive warrants from New York or Massachusetts. Or maybe Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont will consolidate. But until then I wish them great success with this effort. It’s an uphill—or up mountain—labor, but I appreciate they have drawn designs upon the trestleboard for how they present themselves to a receptive segment of the population.

     

‘The Anthroposophist Alka-Seltzer ad man’

     

Courtesy Adweek

One finds the strangest facts in the oddest places. It is unsurprising that Adweek would publish actress Julianna Margulies’ obituary of her father, advertising legend Paul Margulies, but she explains how Anthroposophy was central to his life.

The following is copyrighted ©Adweek magazine.

My father always thought it was ironic that people swooned when they found out that he was the genius behind the famous ad campaign for Alka-Seltzer.

I grew up not really understanding his fame in the advertising world because he never allowed us to watch television. I knew he had a big job, a job that took us to different countries. Ad agencies hired him as their creative director and boasted to have him as their leader. He was the man, after all, who had come up with “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!”

I remember on a happy occasion one summer, my father taking my two older sisters and me to Beverly Hills, California. We stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel! It was so exciting. He had to shoot the commercial in California, and we got to watch them film it. I must have been about seven years old. I remember thinking he was so cool, in his fedora straw hat, his silk cravat, denim shirt and khaki safari jacket.

He was, tall, dark and handsome, and women were constantly blushing around him. I understood how dashing he was at a very young age. We were living in Paris, I was three years old, and we walked into a shop, and I thought the shop lady was pretty. Worried about his well-being, not having a wife, I said, “Mon papa est tres jolie, n’est-ce pas?”

My father always regaled that story, with his sweet chuckle, to anyone who would listen. And everyone always seemed to listen to my father. He was unique to this world, not because of his success in advertising, although some may argue that, but because he was a gentle soul who found himself, at a very young age, searching for the meaning of man.

He had been a philosophy major at Dartmouth College, and then, feeling the pressure from his parents (his mother was one of the first women lawyers to practice in New York state), he found himself at Columbia Law. He told me he dropped out after one year because he always found his way to the philosophy library. Law studies just didn't hold his interest.

What did hold his interest was the question of Being, Self, Soul. Why are we here? What is our journey? How can we make this world better? How can we advance ourselves to a life of truth and goodness and love? It was deep stuff.

In his quest, he went to a farm in Pennsylvania and studied biodynamic farming. It was there that he decided to stop eating meat. It was 1959 and still a time when people thought if you didn’t eat meat, you would get sick and eventually die. My poor grandmother would send him steaks and leave them at his door on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village, begging him to stop the nonsense. But he never did. He always understood other people’s concerns, never pushed vegetarianism on anyone, but kept quietly to his regimen.

My father was drawn to a philosophy called Anthroposophy, founded by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher. He began to read Steiner’s books and study his lectures. It was in Anthroposophy that my father found his calling.

He bumped into advertising at around the same time, and having three little girls and two ex-wives, he saw a way to make a living. But he had tremendous conflicts with the demands of the advertising industry. He was worried that his love for Anthroposophy, the way in which he was choosing to lead his inner life, would contradict his work life. He sought out Dr. Franz E. Winkler, the man who had originally introduced him to the works of Steiner, and expressed his concern. Dr. Winkler told him that as long as he was true to himself, it could never be a contradiction.

And so he embarked on a career as a copywriter with his ideals intact: He would never write for tobacco, alcohol or the meat industry, and he stuck to those principles for his entire career.

In his later years, my father wrote an essay that was published for the Anthroposophical Press: “A Comparison of Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, and Knowledge of Higher Worlds, by Rudolf Steiner.” He had written many famous jingles, several children’s books and a wonderful screenplay about the boxer Daniel Mendoza, but it was in this essay that his most fulfilled work shone through. He delighted in the response to it, the depth of it. He was somehow able to explain the esoteric in simple English.

This is not to say that my father looked down on his life in advertising; he knew he had a talent for it, I would say a great talent, but I’m just a gloating daughter. But he constantly struggled to enrich his inner life while working in an industry that was only skin deep. At times that was frustrating for him; but at other times he really enjoyed it. However, it wasn’t who he was. It wasn’t where he wanted to be. He always told me his dream was to retire to the countryside somewhere in New England, just to be left alone with his books and his study groups. And he did just that at the young age of 50, and embarked fully on a lifelong dream.

As I became more prominent in my career as an actress and voiceover artist, I began to understand what an effect he had in the advertising world. People knew him, respected him, reacted to his name as though he were an iconic figure. He was known as The Man who created “Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz.” I got a kick out of showing up to my voiceover sessions and hearing the writers ask me if my father had approved the copy. When I landed the Chase Bank campaign, I told my dad and he brought out his portfolio that had his original ad from the ’70s: “The Chase is on!” He kept everything he had ever done, and he showed them to me with a gleam in his eye.

I know my father has helped many people find their inner peace. He was heralded as a great teacher, friend and leader in his community in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where he had retired. But I also know that without his ability to sell a product in 30 seconds and excel at it so beautifully, he wouldn’t have been able to reach all the curious minds that ask the question, “How can we live in truth, goodness and love?” As he often quoted from Socrates, one of his favorite philosophers: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

And that’s exactly how he lived his life.
     

‘Mercedes mea culpa, maybe’

    
Merkley and Partners, the Manhattan-headquartered ad agency that gave us the Mercedes-Benz Super Bowl commercial, has issued a perfunctory apology on its Facebook page.

We apologize to anyone offended by the use of the ring worn in our commercial, “Soul,” that ran during the Super Bowl. It was not our intention to make any association with the Freemasons or any organization. In fact, neither we nor our client, Mercedes-Benz USA, were aware that the ring could be associated with the Freemasons. To avoid any confusion going forward, we will modify the commercial prior to any future television airings.

The full-length cut of the commercial, with shots of the famous ring, remains posted on the agency’s blog however.
    

‘Mercedes employs Faust to slur Masons’

  
During the Holocaust, Daimler-Benz was one of the German manufacturers that exploited slave labor, so it knew something about cutting deals with the devil. Therefore it doesn’t faze me in the least to see today its descendant company Mercedes-Benz will borrow from the Faust story to sell its low-end sedans.

During the Super Bowl tonight, a spectacle as famous for its multi-million dollar advertisements as for the football game itself, several ads from the German luxury car-maker will run. One, titled “Soul,” features Willem Dafoe as the devil and the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” in the soundtrack; it shows a young man about to sign away his soul in exchange for the Merc he sees in the billboard being posted across the street. View it here.

Courtesy New York Daily News

Dafoe proffers a golden fountain pen to the impressionable guy. After a lengthy sequence of fantasy scenes, including an indelible image of Kate Upton, the Faust-like character accepts the pen, sets nib to parchment (which, incidentally, depicts something similar to the Chi Ro), only to spy the just posted price of this new Mercedes model on that billboard. Rating his soul at a value higher than the car’s sticker price, he declines the devil’s offer.

Devil Dafoe, attired in black, also sports two rings on his left hand, one of which bears a square and compasses-like sigil. It does not look to me precisely like the square and compasses. Its square is anything but square, and the compasses simply are not compasses, but clearly the design is meant to mimic the primary symbol of Freemasonry. There’s no mistaking it for any other symbol, emblem, logo, letter, word, or character.

“It is what it is,” as the kids today say.

So what can ya do?

The Magpie Mason and other blogs ask you to lend your name to a petition calling on the advertiser to change this ad. In all likelihood, this ad won’t be seen after the game, except maybe on the web for a while. I suppose there also is the chance that an abbreviated version of this commercial could run later this year when this model actually goes to market, but I’m sure shortening the spot would result in losing the shots of that ring. One can hope, anyway.

But the petition: change.org makes it available. Freemasons by nature are not activists, but objecting to such slurs is good exercise. Click here for the petition.

(By the way, my money is on the Ravens, but only because I’m a Magpie.)


MAGPIE EDIT: This spot just aired a second ago (10:23 p.m.), and I did not even see Dafoe’s rings. Perhaps Mercedes learned a lesson after the Masons killed the electricity in their stadium.