Word: ritual
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Government formed in the fuselage of Air Force One, yet another ritual that mocked dignity. But it was, perhaps, that magnificent plane that began to reclaim the majesty of the presidency. With the body of Kennedy onboard, the new President invested formally, Colonel James Swindal taxied his plane out on the emptied runway of Love Field. The ship paused in lonely splendor, then lifted off into a blue sky, clean and beautiful even in that mournful flight...
...election night was festive, Nancy in a long black skirt, some 30 guests from the staff, Cabinet and family. Almost before the group could make respectable headway through the buffet supper, Bush was declared a winner. The White House cranked out the canned victory statement. Reagan made the ritual calls to George Bush and Dan Quayle. His guests drifted into the night and toward the victory celebration in the White House West Wing and delirious parties up and down the capital's broad avenues. Ronald and Nancy Reagan stayed among the White House ghosts and their memories, the Reagan legacy...
...ordinary order of things. People simply did not want to believe it. The police, the public, the press kept trying to convert resonant mystery into conventional tabloid sordidness. The Chamberlains were devout Seventh-Day Adventists, and, since most people know little about that faith, wild rumors that it encouraged ritual murder soon surfaced. Worse, Lindy refused to play the archetypal role that this drama called for. She would not grieve hysterically for the reporters. Throughout her ordeal she was altogether too combative in her own defense, too openly contemptuous of misinformed public opinion...
...mainstream mandate -- that's what this election is all about." A mandate represents a covenant between the candidate and his constituency about what he plans to accomplish. But almost all the causes Bush embraced were both negative and irrelevant to the White House; it would be a bizarre ritual, to say the least, if a President Bush solemnly recited the Pledge of Allegiance each time he stepped into the Oval Office. Dukakis' presidential agenda was almost as shadowy. Even as an underdog presumably liberated from crass campaign calculus, he chose sound-bite slogans over a last chance to talk sense...
Harvard hockey is a festival, an annual excursion into voo-doo, pomp, circumstance and ritual...