America
Fairlie was an anomaly in Washington, a Tory whose unique brand of conservatism frequently left him more sympathetic to the Democrats than the Republicans. These heterodox politics helped him find a perch at The New Republic, where he was a regular contributor from the mid-1970s until his death in 1990. In the mid-1980s, when he was unable to keep up payments on his apartment, he was even reduced to living in his office there, sleeping on a couch next to his desk.
Fairlie devoted much of the second half of his career to trying to explain America to Americans. Between 1976 and 1982, he wrote "Fairlie at Large," a bi-weekly column for The Washington Post. In those pieces he often abandoned political subjects to write about American manners and morals: for instance, why Americans would do well to give up showers in favor of more contemplative baths. His romantic attachment to the possibilities of American life found its fullest expression in a long essay titled "Why I Love America," which The New Republic published on July 4, 1983.
In the winter of 1990, Fairlie fell in the lobby of The New Republic, breaking a hip. After a brief hospitalization, he died on February 25. His ashes were buried in the family plot in Scotland.
Read more about this topic: Henry Fairlie
Famous quotes containing the word america:
“Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of sacralizing person and community.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)
“Women of my age in America are at the mercy of two powerful and antagonistic traditions. The first is the ultradomestic fifties with its powerful cult of motherhood; the other is the strident feminism of the seventies with its attempt to clone the male competitive model.... Only in America are these ideologies pushed to extremes.”
—Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)
“In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are factions, but no conspiracies.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)