Word: rituals
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...violent anyway - ceremonially aggressive. Maybe they just need rites of passage. Once in the '80s, when I spent time in Kenya, I was traveling with a great naturalist/conservationist named David Western. We came upon a Masai orpul - that is, a gathering of six young warriors in the forest, a ritual feast in which they slaughtered one of their precious cows (a rare occasion) and settled down to eating the entire beast, right down to horns and hooves. They had been at it a day or two, and were disgustingly surrounded by gnawed ribs and a boiling jerrycan of guts...
Last August, after being briefed on all these developments by my mother, I went out for brunch with Margaret, a ritual for the age who still respond as her "babies." The conversation turned to the adopted great-grandson. She admitted at first she had been shocked by it all and somewhat repulsed, but she said now all of that was brushed aside by a more pressing concern: How would this be for the baby...
...South Vietnam at the end of April 1975, was like the demolition of Pruitt-Igo three years earlier, when that vast imbecility of social engineering (a huge high-rise housing project for the poor in St. Louis) was at last rigged up with dynamite and reduced to rubble, the ritual suicide of the highest, most expensive hopes. Vietnam was the Pruitt-Igo of American wars. Both had been designed by the same mentality...
...Chinese-American graduate student named Dongxia is strolling through what has become a springtime mating ritual at the nation's top schools of engineering: the tech job fair. In an attention-grabbing booth on one side of the gym at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recruiters from Microsoft make work for the software giant seem like a highly paid extension of college life: a video shows young men and women at the Redmond, Wash., headquarters playing with Nerf toys between all-night bouts of writing code. Nearby, the Boeing booth touts its work on the space station. But Dongxia (pronounced...
...least being vegetarian avoids the whole ritual of denial. People don't seem to have the urge to pulverize vegetables beyond the point of recognition--I can pretty much tell what vegetables are in any salad. But if you are a carnivorous human, don't give me any jive about something being wrong to eat because it reminds you of what the animal was. Better the regret than the denial; nothing like the bittersweet recognition that something had to give for you to have your meal. It's good for your psyche. No meal should...