Word: ritual
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...Face, Running Antelope. A package event for tourists? Hardly. The Indians got there on horseback and camped in the cold. In fact, they were not dressed for camcorders. They wore jeans, permanent press and wrap-around shades. When they set fire to a wad of sage, in a purification ritual, it was in a Folger's coffee can. And the graveside speeches touched on the plague of alcoholism and suicide among reservation youth. "We want our children to be proud that they are descendants of chiefs," says Sitting Bull kinsman McNeil. "So when they play cowboys and Indians, they...
...loved the fat. "The general rule on the hunt was, the fattier the better. They were on the original Atkins diet," Leandra says. With that, she dips three fingers into a container of freshly rendered pig fat and licks them. There must be cultures where this is a mating ritual...
After 1954, whenever I heard the pledge recited (in the ritual stream-of-consciousness way that one says, "ThirtydayshathSeptemberAprilJuneandNovembe ralltheresthavethirtyone"), it sounded somehow tampered with and wrong. The original version had been grooved into my brain. I mistrusted the addition of under God first of all on unconscious aesthetic grounds. The new phrase, set off by tendentious commas, was a hiccup in the flow of the drone, the mumbled civic music, the school kids' om. Even as a callow youth, I sensed that someone had intruded an alien and politicized bromide into the pledge. Again, the adjacent word indivisible banged...
...After 1954, whenever I heard the pledge recited (in the ritual stream-of-consciousness way that one says, "ThirtydayshathSeptemberAprilJune-andNovembe ralltheresthavethirtyone"), it sounded somehow tampered with and wrong. The original version had been grooved into my brain. I mistrusted the addition of under God first of all on unconscious aesthetic grounds. The new phrase, set off by tendentious commas, was a hiccup in the flow of the drone, the mumbled civic music, the school kids' om. Even as a callow youth, I sensed that someone had intruded an alien and politicized bromide into the pledge. Again, the adjacent word indivisible...
...striking break with tradition on a day characterized by centuries-old ritual, the gray clouds that had been gathering all morning let loose with a downpour about a half-hour into the ceremony. The rain continued unabated until a few minutes before the program ended, when it slowed to a drizzle...