Word: rasputin
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First, Prince Yusupov and the others fed poisoned cakes and wine to Rasputin. The Czarina's dissolute monk seemed to thrive on them. He called for more wine and went on with the party...
Next, the conspirators shot the starets a few times, and that slowed him down. He was still alive, but less chipper. Assassination as low comedy: now they doggedly carried Rasputin out to the frozen Neva and shoved him through a hole in the ice. He kept bobbing to the surface...
...like to think that Rasputin stayed dead for a half-century and then, irrepressible, achieved reincarnation, not as one person this time, but as an entire decade--the '60s. This expansive metaphysics would have allowed him to show off all his facets: as holy man and party boy, as faith healer, sexual omnivore, purveyor of mystic salvations and bogus profundities, enemy of soap, hairy narcissist...
...survivor. In any event, the '60s have proved to be just as difficult to eliminate as Rasputin was. Or, to be bipartisan, as hard to dispose of as Richard Nixon, who went down into the frozen river a hundred times during his career and always bobbed back. Nixon and the '60s, though they hated each other, were each driven by a fierce relentlessness. Nixon finally died...
...still to think of Medgar Evers or Martin Luther King Jr., or the night Bobby Kennedy was shot. But so much of the time turned to meretricious junk, an idealism gone clueless and narcissistic. We saw traces of the pattern again in the case of the Unabomber, for example--Rasputin with a chemistry set. Or we felt the vibration in the dreamy, New Age utterances of poor seven-year-old Jessica Dubroff's mother...