So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish Frys

Masonic Magazine issue #4 has just been published. Stephen Dafoe's editorial called "The Restaurant at the End of the Masonic Universe" packs a punch that may send Freemasonry plummeting into a blazing star like one of Disaster Area's robot ships during a concert.

(Don't worry if you don't grok the Douglas Adams references. Many people over, say, age 65, won't.)

Bro. Dafoe takes the time-worn Masonic slogan "We make good men better," and, by analogy to a restaurant that promises to "make good food better," shows that what Freemasonry has been dishing up is, generally speaking, unpalatable and undigestible.

...The restaurant chain seldom lives up to its own slogan. The restaurants are often poorly decorated — their tables and chairs wobbly and in need of repair. Staff often quarrel with one another and the management, too often, seem only to be concerned with climbing the corporate ladder to the head office. The food, so much talked about is bland at best and dreadful at worst.

Yet as each new patron comes in for the first time to sample this "good food made better" he sees a group of smiling faces, all lapping up the meal as if it was the greatest food on the planet — just like the advertising people said it was.

As one newcomer after another visits the restaurant, only to be served the same pablum from the same dozen smiling faces who are happily lapping it up, the restaurant becomes less and less appetizing to everyone else.

He wonders how it is that the restaurant survives and why the same dozen diners seem to enjoy the food so much.

His conclusion is a simple one — they like things the way they are and the establishment will never change so long as the chain is run by people who like to make bland food and patronized by people who like to eat the same.

In a nutshell, that's where Freemasonry in the U.S. and Canada is today. Bland. Boring. Offering nothing for a young man to sink his teeth in. It remains tasty only to a few old men who have forgotten what it's like to truly partake of real sustenance.

Masons | Freemasonry | BurningTaper.com | Masonic Magazine | Stephen Dafoe | Burning Taper | | Douglas Adams | Salmon of Doubt