"As new chants are created and old chants die off, the archive preserves history and encapsulates the humor and banter of fans in different cities and countries," Ward said.
"These represent family amusement at a time of stress," said Patricia N. Dohrenwend, director of the archives, as she showed off some photographs.
It does in the end, when merely smart and virtuous art gets shuffled off to the archives.
Thoughtful Americans must hope the heightened defenses of the archives pay off.
Five 52-foot-long tractor trailers carted off the sound archive that started with a 16-year-old boy buying a recording of arias by Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling.
If I'm honest, I found it hard to share his moral jitters about Scottish seafarers being involved in the whaling industry "as recently as the 1960s" – yes, barely half a century ago! – however off-putting the archive clips.
"Everyone else in the history department went off every summer to the archives in Rangoon, Baghdad, etc, and got deep inside the data.
The elderly but still spry Mr Yakovlev, working doggedly to publish 60 volumes of secret Soviet records even as the FSB gradually cuts off his access to the archives, reminisces: "I, like a romantic, like a naif, fought for the creation of parliamentarianism, so that there would be alternatives, so that people could choose.
It seemed for a while like one of those names RIM would never get around to using, but they subsequently filed for an extension of time this past May — it's possible that RIM has chosen to dust off a name from the archives to use for their latest smartphone.
The group got off the train at the Archive-Navy Memorial stop and floated up the long escalator into a new world.
