[Re-posted from earlier today]
Henry Fairlie published this gem about his adopted country – like me, he was a Tory and a passionate American – thirty years ago today. If you have never read it, do yourself a favor. It’s the experience of a Brit brought up in post-war England discovering America in later life. This anecdote never fails to make me smile – with recognition and wonderment:
One spring day, shortly after my arrival, I was walking down the long, broad street of a suburb, with its sweeping front lawns (all that space), its tall trees (all that sky), and its clumps of azaleas (all that color). The only other person on the street was a small boy on a tricycle. As I passed him, he said “Hi!”—just like that. No four-year-old boy had ever addressed me without an introduction before. Yet here was this one, with his cheerful “Hi!” Recovering from the culture shock, I tried to look down stonily at his flaxen head, but instead, involuntarily, I found myself saying in return: “Well—hi!” He pedaled off, apparently satisfied. He had begun my Americanization.
“Hi!” As I often say—for Americans do not realize it— the word is a democracy. (I come from a country where one can tell someone’s class by how they say “Hallo!” or “Hello!” or “Hullo,” or whether they say it at all.) But anyone can say “Hi!” Anyone does. Shortly after my encounter with the boy, I called on the then Suffragan Bishop of Washington. Did he greet me as the Archbishop of Canterbury would have done? No. He said, “Hi, Henry!” I put it down to an aberration, an excess of Episcopalian latitudinarianism. But what about my first meeting with Lyndon B. Johnson, the President of the United States, the Emperor of the Free World, before whom, like a Burgher of Calais, a halter round my neck, I would have sunk to my knees, pleading for a loan for my country? He held out the largest hand in Christendom, and said, “Hi, Henry!”
One thing that shocked me most about Washington when I moved there was the Mall. I was expecting some kind of royal park or something, I suppose. But around these massive neo-fascist monuments, Americans were playing frisbee, chowing down on picnics, scuffing up the grass, treating the place as if it were their own. And then I realized the core difference: it was their own. There had been no monarchy presiding over this Mall after the Revolution – and that democratic instinct, that leveling perspective gave us frisbees and volleyball and touch football all around secular hallowed ground. I was hooked within weeks of arrival here. Why? I’ll let Henry explain:
I had been in the country about eight years, and was living in Houston, when a Texan friend asked me one evening: “Why do you like living in America? I don’t mean why you find it interesting—why you want to write about it—but why you like living here so much.” After only a moment’s reflection, I replied, “It’s the first time I’ve felt free.”
(Photo: George Goldstein, Harold Johnson and Harold Valentine prepare to march through their neighborhood playing their drums to celebrate the 4th July, circa 1935. By FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.)
The Dish 