The Awful Truth, page 2
So I was doubly intrigued when my boyfriend recently handed me a conspiracy tape about, of all things, the Freemasons. The tape was made by one Ron Carlson, who gives lectures on "non-Christian cults" in the Midwest, mostly to groups of gun-and-Jesus-loving Elk Lodge brutes who enjoy having more mistrust stirred up in their lives. Carlson, a Hotwheeling Fundamentalist who takes everything in the Bible literally, spent two years of his life ripping apart Alfred Pike's "Morals and Dogma" (a book only given to 32nd degree Masons), comparing it to the Gospels, and finding it spiritually dank.
What bugs Carlson is that the ecumenical Masons don't seem to think that Jesus is any more bitchin' than, say, Zoroaster. Carlson does not like this. He also takes special offense at some of the Masons' blood oath initiation ceremonies, wherein initiates roll up their pants and expose their left breasts and swear to have their tongues pulled out and their bowels torn asunder if they tell the ancient Mason secrets.
I must admit I found it a little disturbing to think of my old grandfather with his weird Kansas dignity performing these childish, spit-two-times-on-the-skull-of-this-dog, do-not-ever-tell-where-this-treehouse-is-or-your-mom-will-have-her eyes-sucked-out-by-pirates initiation stunts. My grandpa was a mild-mannered Christian Scientist who raised and sold chinchillas (his business card, which I still have, reads "Bernard's Chinchilla Ranch -- See the Bernard Stock and Let Your Eyes Decide"). Supposedly, he
only became a Freemason because he wanted to play the clarinet, and the best band in Denver at the time was at the Shriner's El Jebel lodge. To play in the band he had to become a Shriner, which meant that he first had to become a 32nd degree Mason.
As a member of the Shriner band, grandpa wore leather lederhosen and the fez. He also wore Mason shoes, which for my entire life I assumed were part of some weird Freemason aesthetic for the world: Institutionally cubist wingtips for men, stubby wedge-blocks hewn in dressy vinyl for women. Knobby puritan children's shoes with clumsy ham-thumbed buckles and those crepe "Booger soles," as we called them. It seemed to me that all the Masons were really after was the complete de-sexualization of the human foot and the internment of all perishables in sturdy glass jars. I have since learned, through extensive research, that neither Mason jars nor Mason shoes have anything to do with the Masonic organization.
Once I got over the bad shoe thing, the Masons seemed like a pretty decent ancient secret benevolent society (plus I was always grateful to them for the use of grandpa's posthumously-bequeathed party brim). Holy Ron, however, took a darker view. He brought his tape to a great feverish arm-waving climax by asserting that Alfred Pike, King Honcho of Masonry, according to Freemason expert Albert Mackie, addressed the "23 Supreme Councils of the World" on July 14th, 1889, and told them "The Masonic religion should be...maintained in the purity of the Luciferian doctrines. Yes, Lucifer is God. The true and philosophic religion of Freemasonry is the belief in Lucifer."
Good Lord! I thought as I ejected the cassette. So the people who built the children's hospitals were actually naked jig-dancing blood orgy participants who craved union with the Goat Lord? And grandpa had a secret life as a cackling oiled pagan, rampantly indulging in obscene and dangerous pleasures? Ready as I was to believe that men behind locked doors are always doing secret furtive nasty things, this seemed a bit much.
Well, OK. Maybe Alfred Pike did say this to his congregation back in the 1800s, and everybody in the Mason community just sort of shuffled that particular meeting aside, like when senile old Bette Davis started lurching into crazy irrelevant old-person prattle at the Oscars and everyone on the live telecast tried to kick sand over What She Had Just Done so that nobody would notice that her mind had just unraveled before the Academy like a loose potholder. Yeah, well, said the guys in the fezzes, shuffling back and forth on the men's room tiles, Alfred said we worship the Devil, but, you know, he's been under a lot of stress lately. It was late; his kid was carsick on the way up. Let's get on with the rubber limb donations and see if he mentions it again; meanwhile we can keep him floating in Demerol in one of those big glass jars we're so famous for, until this thing blows over.
Even for someone as paranoid and disaffected as myself, it all sounded pretty bogus. And I had an even stronger reason for doubting that the Masons were really in Satan's thrall. After he gave up the chinchilla ranch, my grandpa moved into a trailer and sold hearing-aids. The badge of his band at the El Jebel lodge was a rose growing out of a pile of manure. This is not a Satanic icon. If Satan had really been on grandpa's side, I think he would have worn sharp Brooks Brothers suits, not short lederhosen with black socks on his blue-white legs, and he would have been playing icy chamber music instead of happily retarded polka. The Shriners I knew, like my grandpa, weren't slick enough for Satan. He'd have gladly passed that bunch over to Christ or Buddha or whoever. Satan would never be caught dead in those shoes.
