Word: embalm
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...true that "tradition tends to embalm the moment in time when the culture feels it is at its peak." Call our generation neopagan, secular or whatever, it is at odds with phoniness and insincerity. Our irreverent generation is not bent on overturning the past, but on crying out against the arbitrary embalming and sanctification of one historical moment. Our American lack of "tradition" is not our national stigma; our innate respect for and optimistic sense of an evolving human experience has been the unsung American contribution to modern civilization...
...classic context, tradition tends to embalm the moment in time when the culture feels it is at its peak. British sovereigns ride to their coronations in an 18th century coach with an escort of cavalrymen wearing plumed helmets, and the guards at the Vatican are still dressed in the costumes Michelangelo reputedly designed for them. It is impossible to imagine a guard of honor for a U.S. President dressed as Minutemen. For Americans believe profoundly that the best is yet to be; that whatever it is-a building, a custom, an institution-they can do it better next time...
...rest of the film is equally far-out but seldom funny. Obviously enamored of Dr. Strangelove, Scenarists Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern (also co-scenarist of Strangelove) commit the funereal folly of thinking that any joke about death is worth repeating To cremate a pet cheerfully, embalm a baby, or mold crazy expressions onto the face of a corpse (John Gielgud, for example) may be good for laughs among professional crapehangers, but on a giant screen such gags seem merely gratuitous...
...favorite colors of the Pre-Raphaelite painters was called Mummy Brown - and not out of joking affection. It was a warm pigment made from the bitumen used by ancient Egyptians to embalm their dead, famed for its preservative powers...
...march soberly past his waxy form, guarded by rigid Russian soldiers as immobile as the corpse. Not long ago, when Khrushchev was asked how Lenin's remains were kept looking so lifelike, he replied: "That's easy. We just take him out once a month and re-embalm him." So it is with Lenin's ideological remains. Constantly re-embalmed, retouched, re-clothed, he remains at the center of a savage historical fight, the most important split in the history of Communism...