Politics

The Membership Drive Asks For No Name, No Face And No Idea Beyond The One, And The Desk Has Found The Field It Does Ask For

An application that records nothing cannot reject anybody, cannot detect a repeat, and cannot evidence a single one of the three thousand it claims.

By Odell Marsh Filed from the extremism desk, with the form on the table 4 min read
An extremism desk reading of a membership application showing the fields NAME, FACE and IDEA each struck through and marked not asked, a fourth field SHIPPING ADDRESS marked required in gold, and a bottom tally reading claimed 3,000, counted 380 and parking tickets issued 219, under a red banner reading the form collects one fact and it is your address.
Three fields the form does not ask for, one it insists on, and three counts nobody will reconcile.

The species has opened recruitment. The desk has the application, which runs to one screen, and it asks for no name, no photograph, no date of birth, no employer, no reference, no previous affiliation and no statement of belief. There is a box confirming the applicant holds the idea. The idea is the one they have. It is not described on the form, because the form assumes the applicant knows which one is meant, and the assumption is sound.

This desk has read a great many recruitment documents and files this one as the least demanding of them. That is not a joke about standards. A form is an instrument, and an instrument that collects nothing measures nothing.

What The Form Cannot Do

It cannot screen. There is no field on which an application could be rejected, so the organization that describes itself as selective has removed every basis on which it could select. It cannot detect a repeat: one applicant filing eleven times produces eleven members, and nothing in the intake would show it. It cannot exclude a member who is already a member, a person who has never heard of them, or this correspondent, and the desk mentions the third only to note that it did not apply, because a count obtained that way is not a count.

Most of all it cannot evidence growth. The drive announced three thousand new members this quarter and its own intake system is incapable of producing that figure or any other. The number did not come from the form. Nothing can come from the form.

The One Required Field

There is a required field. It is at the bottom, it is marked required, and it is a shipping address. The uniform has to arrive somewhere. Khaki below, navy above, and a white mask where the courage would be, and none of it ships to a post office box, because the form says so in the only sentence on it that carries a rule.

"The application asks for one fact and it is the fact a process server would want. I have written that sentence down four times to check that it stays true. It does." Field note, entry 231

So the identifying data exists. It was always going to: a mask is not a disappearance, it is a redirection, and the material has to be posted. What the form settles is who holds it. The applicant surrenders a home address to an organization and receives, in exchange, a guarantee that no other member will ever learn his name. The anonymity runs one way. It faces the public, the press, the employer and the reunion, and it does not face the leadership, which is not anonymous to itself and now has the addresses of three thousand people who are anonymous to each other.

In the field there is a term for a population in which no individual can identify any other and one party holds the identity of all of them. It is not a flock and it is not a herd, both of which recognize their own. It is a collection, and the word for what the holder does with it is husbandry.

The Column That Is Never Reconciled

The sightings register carries the claimed count and this desk's count in adjacent columns and has never reconciled them, which is the register's whole method. The quarter's claim is three thousand. At the largest muster of the quarter this desk counted three hundred and eighty individuals, over four hours, from a fixed position, twice, and the second count differed from the first by one.

There is now a third column, and it was not put there by this desk. The corridor is the 2.4 mile municipal parking structure the desk mapped in the spring, and the structure has a ticket machine. The machine does not care what anybody is wearing, it is not intimidated, it has no view on immigration, and it issued 219 tickets that morning at eleven dollars each. Tickets are per vehicle and not per person, so the number is high rather than low, and it is the only figure in this article produced by an instrument with no interest in the outcome.

Three thousand, three hundred and eighty, and two hundred and nineteen. The desk publishes all three and reconciles none of them, as it has since 2022. It notes only that the organization built a system that cannot count its own members and then announced a number, and that a municipal parking garage in the same city has better records than the movement does.

Desk note: the binoculars are back. They were returned on Tuesday by the culture desk with the strap on backwards and a receipt inside the case for something the desk did not buy. June Hardaway has asked whether an organization that will not let its members know each other can be said to have a membership at all. That is a spine question and it is going to her.