Word: patriarchalism
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...curse of the greatest TV actors is that no one believes they're acting. As Archie Bunker, the beseiged blue-collar bigot and patriarch of "All in the Family," Carroll O'Connor became his character so completely and physically that it was impossible to imagine him as a separate person. It wasn't just his New York-y delivery - those "youses" and "terlets" - but the way he carried himself: the tousled hair, the bone-weary shamble, the plaintive Irish eyes rolling heavenward at the dingbats and pinkos who surrounded him in his own house...
...with a contract marriage drawn up by a lawyer, my great-grandparents set out to achieve the American Dream. Fong See and Letticie raised five mixed-race children and ran five antique stores in southern California. Fong See became the patriarch of Los Angeles Chinatown. He was the first Chinese in the U.S. to own an automobile and was one of the few Chinese to do business with the white community by selling props to the nascent film industry and antiques to customers like Frank Lloyd Wright. Despite these successes, Fong See's four sons?all American-born citizens...
...Jerusalem. When Caliph Umar, one of Muhammad's successors, conquered the Jerusalem of the Christian Byzantines in 638, he insisted that the three faiths of Abraham coexist. He refused to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher when he was escorted around the city by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch. Had he done so, he explained, the Muslims would have wanted to build a mosque there to commemorate the first Islamic prayer in Jerusalem...
...patriarch's parting shot
...however, add a footnote. As fall approached, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, the irascible and slightly infamous patriarch of the Kennedy clan, called me up to muse a bit about that hot summer (Berlin Wall, Khrushchev blasts at the Vienna Summit). The conversation went something like this: "I tell you, Hugh, Jack is the luckiest guy I know. He could fall into a pile of manure and come up smelling like a rose. The Bay of Pigs and the other things were the best lessons he could have gotten and he got them all early. He knows now what will work...