Word: ritualization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...SELF-CONGRATULATORY RITUAL, repeated every day, every week, all over America. Separate the clear glass bottles from the green and amber ones. Place the newsprint in one basket, mixed white paper in another, the reams of used computer paper in a third. Haul the whole lot out to the curb. There. You've just done your bit for humanity: you've recycled. It's Miller time...
Nothing is as bothersome to corporate CEOs as the annual ritual of subjecting their compensation to outside scrutiny. Disclosures of king-size pay packages and royal perks regularly rouse public resentment and shareholder revolts, not to mention congressional calls for reform. Unable to cap the criticism, the bosses are moving quietly but aggressively to plug the flow of information. In their cross hairs are the compensation consultants who prepare the data under contract with big corporations. Led by the Business Roundtable, the captains of industry have issued veiled threats to consultants who share information with journalists, financial analysts and regulatory...
...Quebec. French lay explorers craved beaver pelts. The priestly black gowns wore hair shirts and spiked girdles in self- mortification, and lusted to harvest souls. They strove to break down native sexual and religious customs, but, as Vollmann tells it, were more tolerant of the Indians' prolonged and joyous ritual torture of captured enemies. Tribes sold their souls (literally) as dearly as possible, in return for iron hatchets, copper cook pots, measles and smallpox, a few guns and, rather late in the game, brandy. When they could, they caught the Jesuits and tortured them, thus increasing the clerics' chances...
...years ago -- what are known today as Wasps. The Ur-Wasps brought with them a load of cultural baggage, which they unpacked when they arrived. Their load included a politics of natural right, derived from English Whigs; Protestant churches, mostly Bible reading and "low" in ritual and theology; and a near religious belief in the virtues of working hard and getting rich. These traits reinforced one another: pulpits proliferated under nonauthoritarian government, and the work ethic flourished under the stimulus of earnest preachment...
Those who dare "drop the flag" and resign from the gang face a brutal little ceremony called being "violated" or "jumped out." The precise ritual varies from gang to gang: sometimes each member of the gang, which may be several dozen strong, gets a free swing at the victim; other times four or five members are assigned to conduct the beating for a set amount of time. Whatever the punishment, the results are strikingly similar. "They give you a head-to-toe, which means you get your ass kicked," says Frank Perez, program director for the Chicago Commons Association gang...