Word: rituals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Viet Nam war, in particular, has exposed the weaknesses of the briefing ritual. The requirement of brevity means that briefers must rely heavily on hard facts and statistics, even when dealing with subjects that defy quantification. Time and again, military briefers in Viet Nam have "proved" that the war was being won with the help of impressive "body counts" of enemy dead that were impossible to verify, let alone dispute. With the aid of computers, U.S. officials were equally sanguine about stating to the decimal point how many villages were "secure" in Viet Nam. Such was the faith...
...ritual, the military briefer is not supposed to depart from traditional practice. His performance is frequently inspected as closely as his uniform for flaws. He must speak in a neutral, colorless voice that nonetheless conveys enthusiasm. He must not stumble in his grammar or pronunciation; ambitious junior officers understandably devote many idle hours to perfecting their delivery. A briefing may begin with a comment intended to jolt the audience into paying attention, or at least staying awake. It might, for example, start with the statement: "We have won the war in Viet Nam." Or, depending on the audience...
...group of aging men trudged slowly through the imperial paddyfield in Tokyo's Palace compound, stooping to cut the rice plants in an annual harvest ritual as old as the gods of Japan. Their leader, in a gray shirt and a battered panama hat, was once considered the descendant of the sun and is still patron of all agriculture-the Emperor himself. In a traditional announcement, the Palace reported that Hirohito, 68, and his chamberlains had harvested "a good crop" from the 350-square-yard paddy. Part of the sacred grain will be distilled into black and white sake...
...Ingmar Bergman awoke from a tortured sleep, seized a camera and began to film what he had just been dreaming. Reality is distorted and logic becomes madness in The Ritual, Bergman's most nightmarish fantasy since The Silence. In the claustrophobic office of some anonymous bureaucrat, three actors (Ingrid Thulin, Anders Ek and Gunnar Böornstrand) perform a bizarre masque, part psychodrama, part sexual charade. They are like the mummers from The Seventh Seal or the circus performers from The Naked Night imprisoned in an allegory of doom. Inevitably the object of the masque is death...
...such a school, academics take up a minimal amount of time. Students attend lectures only when they don't have anything better to do (such as sleeping). To fill up the rest of their time, Harvard has invented rituals. The first ritual you'll meet is freshmen orientation week. It is something like summer camp when it rains. Boring. You spend most of your freshmen week sitting around waiting to go to introductory meetings where you sit around some more and listen to a lot of people-deans, proctors, glee club directors, and members of Crimson Key-talk. The purpose...