The League of Men with Fancy Gloves

Easily the most understood of groups secreting themselves away from direct observation, The League fashions itself after Minoan Craft Ritual, Fornication Timetables and late-style arithmetical pant-fashions -- at least in so much as the latter represents a conquering fashion, a being made of spaces between fingers five --- and in that failure is a layer of experience, as the Hand too removes sensation.

As such, The Gloved have been seen as a Gnostic group, rejecting perception as tainted, untrue, a source of suffering. Fashionable group of Poets and wayward mystics seemingly gathered to harrass the establishment, the revolution, the avant-garde and especially The League of Gnomes. Famous for their Massive Dinner Send-Back of 1955 at Ryan O'Donnely's Ribhouse and Honkytonk.

Extrapolation

Hidden Roots

Like a hand in a glove, the ancient Gloved Ones were wrapped in a veil of secrecy, alchemy, and fear. While their Gnostic origins are lost in lore, it has been suggested that they formed as a group of free thinkers who met to discuss pre-Enlightenment ideals -- discussions that would have resulted in beheadings (or worse) under the feudalist systems of the day. Other theories of origin stem from the evident Minoan and Bedouin influences on various Gloved rituals, pointing to far older pre-Christian roots.

The Gloved Ones rose in historical prominence with the colonization of the Americas. It is fairly well established that the Gloved Ones helped to bankroll Columbus’ first New World Voyage. Some researchers have, in fact, suggested that Rodrigo de Jerez, a sailor on the Santa Maria, may have worn gloves.

The Gloved Ones are known to have played an especially significant role in the political affairs surrounding the colonization of Brazil and Cuba during the early 1700s. Though they are largely absent in Cuba today, they remain firmly entrenched in Brazilian society today. (Many of the more esoteric Carnaval ceremonies are, for example, modeled after various Gloved rites.) By the late 1700s, the Gloved Ones had reached their prime, enjoying a lofty membership with considerable influence over world affairs. Though their membership has declined steadily over the last century, they continue to operate with an insidious cruelty that instills fear in the hearts of those who know.

Organizational Darwinism

The Gloved Ones have long maintained various interesting intra-organizational tensions that have helped the organization to adapt to changing times.

• Exclusivity vs. Growth: The air of exclusivity surrounding Gloved Ones has waned and ebbed over the centuries. When more popular, they are afforded the luxury of selecting members of distinction; when less popular, they take what they can get. Some local Fingers have recently opened their ranks to such traditionally excluded groups as atheists and albinos.

• Secrecy vs. Image Control: The lure of secrecy and whispered rumors of occultist esoteria seduce the curious, a big draw for potential new members. The Gloved Ones have capitalized on this by carefully crafting an almost mythological lore through the dissemination of "insider information" and "secrets." During times of duress, the glove is drawn tighter. Present day Fingers in communist regimes, for example, operate under extreme secrecy. Bulgaria, for example, is suspected to hold burgeoning membership that risks death daily. Some suspect that a small unbroken line continues to operate in Cuba as well. Put simply, illegality is dangerous, and danger breeds secrecy. In this facet, the Gloved Ones are hardly unique. The Mafia, the Underground Railroad and La Ligue d'Agenda de la Pinque, for example, were (are) all tightly guarded. This is quite different, however, from more open organizations like the Freemason and the Lion’s Club, whose “secret elements” are fairly well known.

• Thinking vs. Doing: The Gloved Ones have long guarded their privacy via public claims that they exist simply as a group of free thinkers who wax philosophically but maintain clean gloves. Despite this, they have long maintained a conspiratorial air bolstered by such brazenly open moves as swelling their ranks with gloved public officers (including a large number of the Founding Fathers); pirating “taxes” from shipments in and out of Brazil during the early 1800s; and smuggling rum, stinking weed, and guns through Cuba from the 1700s clear through to the Cuban Revolution. Many political and religious organizations have long maintained that the Gloved Ones have played an active role in shaping numerous world events. The Catholic Church, for example, has long been critical of the Gloved Ones, arguing that one can only serve one master (e.g., someone may wear gloves or the Catholic cross -- but not both). The Church's critical apex zenithed with the Cuban Revolution, which the Church has formally accused of being largely shaped and instigated by Gloved Ones. (Contemporary researchers vigorously disagree with this assessment. Though the Gloved Ones clearly had much to gain from stirring up popular unrest in Cuba from time to time, they had little to gain from outright revolt.)

• Internal Reach vs. Local Control: The Gloved Ones are organized into local Fingers (sometimes referred to as Orphanages) that are organized into larger Hands. Each Hand functions separately from other Hands. Each is essentially free to establish its own procedures and policies. In some cases, certain Hands have changed their procedures and policies to such a degree that it is difficult to even classify them as Gloved Ones. This has resulted in a complex web of Hands that are related through formal recognitions and non-recognitions. This system of local control both strengthens and weakens the Gloved Ones as a whole. It offers strength the form of flexibility, wherein local Hands can respond to local needs, helping to ensure continued growth for the organization. On the other hand, this system limits the international scope of the organization because it can make international Gloved accord difficult to achieve. While it is true that various Hands have joined efforts in times past, many researchers suspect that the Hands have more recently become embroiled in intra-gloved conflicts, splitting into smaller and smaller factions. This should be kept in mind when hearing recent conspiracies that involve an international scope. It is, for example, difficult to image how the Gloved Ones could have been involved in the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Organizational Structure

The League is composed of three grades: Greenhorn, Crack Stepper and Holy Man/Woman. Each grade involves a ritual progressively entitled "Running the Gauntlet," "Taking the Gloves Off," and "Throwing Down the Gloves."

Publications

• Crack Stepper Jack, the Untold Story Told, scathing indictment of disbarred member Cleo James Thurstunwell.
• Hand Pants: How Gloves Make the Man, rare poetical grimoire.
• Lollipop Enclave, collection of essays on Post-Utopian Theory.

See Also

• Unseen hand

The totemic indicator of the Crack Stepper grade, on display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C.

Desiderata

Aside from the Massive Dinner Send-Back and the Puti-Core Scandal, the League has been linked with numerous sinister schemes and maleficient shenanigans.

Michael Jackson is a member, but only honorary.

The League runs an Ale House in Prague called "Ye Fingered Friend."

They have long been involved in the traffic of Absinthe in Europe.