Among the Intellectualoids / Guilt Trip

...We did, however, meet with a chieftain named Prince Heritier A. Plakoo Mlapa...

...Togo is the 36th poorest country in the world...

...19 (regularly $36) N One-year Canadian or foreign subscription...

...Orthodox Catholics have newspapers, quarterly journals, family magazines, and clergy magazines, but they have no "literary" magazine that can speak with the same authority and "weight" as a Commonweal or a Commentary...

...As for such African practices as the Somba tribe's use of self-immolation, which are more difficult to portray in a flattering light, the author cautions Europeans not to focus on the "outward forms" of such rituals but to understand "what their justification i s . " He reminds the Europeans that Europe brought only war, exploitation, and Christianity...

...Their one true enemy was never the Nazis...

...Several female journalists were eager to learn whether the Togolese sisters shared their feminist ideals...

...11 (regularly $17) (Payment must be drawn in U.S...

...he wore a pith helmet with mosquito netting...

...He proudly displayed relics from his ancestor, Mensah I, a notorious slave trader of the 18S0s...

...He delivered a well-worn speech, as though for the 100th time, welcoming us as "peace makers...

...Throughout the Taki Theodoracopulos is The American Spectator's European editor...

...Accordingly, he had arranged an interview with one of Togo's wealthy female cloth merchants...

...Christmas Day came up gray and wet...

...But orthodox Catholics have nothing comparable in the field...

...We waited for them crouched on the floor, and around mid-day they began approaching...

...We were, needless to say, among the fortunate...

...In the event of the expected trouble with England, the Erie Canal would be the only means by which we could ever move the supplies so vital to waging modern war...

...Moreover, there is a prejudice among modernist Catholics that those Catholics who really believe in the Bible, the creeds, tradition, and the Church are intellectually feeble...

...Captains, cooks, drivers, hostlers, repairmen and lock tenders will be left without means of livelihood, not to mention the numerous farmers now employed in growing hay for horses...

...For years following the Communist coup more and more bodies were discovered--victims, all of them, of the "red terror...

...had the Nana Benzes acquired political influence...

...The sights generally confirmed this...

...These women are called Nana Benzes because they go about in Mercedes-Benzes...

...Her interest on the trip was feminism and the women of Togo...

...Father wasn't surprised, however...

...As you may well know, Mr...

...Another royal Togolese we met, Assiakoley IV Adjete, from a dusty town named Agbodrafo, wore bifocals and a white ruffled cap that looked like a baby's bonnet...

...Help us explode old myths and prejudices...

...The next day, most of the group journeyed to Benin, a Marxist country said to be excellent for buying baskets and native art...

...Alli of the High Commission for Tourism, had apparently anticipated...

...four years of occupation the reds spent more energy and time betraying nationalists to the Germans than fighting the enemy...

...You see, we believe that orthodox Catholics need a high-grade magazine that really speaks to the mind as well as the heart, that speaks Truth with clarity, verve, and style...

...Christmas 1944 was a bad time for us...

...Subscribe today...

...few were working...

...I lost two uncles and somebody very special to the butchers, but that is beside the point...

...If canal boats are supplanted by 'railroads', serious unemployment will result...

...His printed business card describes him as "Dr...

...The men, by contrast, appeared demoralized...

...Formerly a French Mandate, Togo has been ruled since 1967 by President EyaCharlotte Hays is a free-lance journalist living in Washington, D. C. dema, a portly man in uniform whose visage beamed out at us from numerous billboards and photographs...

...He has been replaced by a cultural supplicant who dares to notice only the superiority of Third World countries...

...The death of Eleni Gatzoyiannis, the murdered mother of former New York Times reporter Nicholas Gage, is not however...

...Pbre Touvi told me that all the country's "higher ups" patronize church schools...

...We were all disappointed not to meet President Eyadema, who was on the savannah participating in war games with Togolese and French troops...

...Sasha glowered at me from beneath the brim of his Doonesbury-style helmet...

...But a U.S...

...President Eyadema had wanted the 35-story building to be the " t a l l e s t " in the region, explained Bennett, and this was the only way to do it...

...There were epidemics of cholera, typhus, and diphtheria...

...I believe my father told me there were about twelve of them...

...Cleora became a victim of this phenomenon one night while walking to her bungalow at the fancy hotel where we stayed in Lomb, the capital city...

...Not only possible, say I, but true...

...by Taki Not possible, you say...

...The federal government must preserve the canals for the following reasons: One...

...It was packed every time I walked past it...

...First of all we visited what appeared to be a noonday disco where people were doing "the chicken...

...A popular shopping item with our group was a Mickey Mouse-type watch featuring an Eyadema face that lights up at intervals...

...He knew all about the Communists through the resistance...

...I sensed a certain discretion on the part of the Togolese whenever his name came up...

...One scrupulously observed rubric of conduct was to avoid noticing Togo's economic situation...

...The abovementioned magazines are distinguished and influential trend-setters, and the time has come to give them some serious competition...

...There was no civil war, just an armed uprising by Communist stooges...

...But of course it was their right to apply their African Values to us...

...The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed...

...Three...

...The last "deprived" Africans of their true religions and left them "uprooted...

...Mass graves filled the gardens of Athens and littered the countryside...

...As I learned on my trip, the era of the Ugly American is gone...

...Many were lying about drinking beer...

...The reason...

...Before leaving, I had only the vaguest notion where Togo was: some place in West Africa...

...My own feeling was that it might have been more pertinent to inquire about the Status Of Men in Togo...

...Born in 1977 and published 10 times a year, we've already made a mark...

...It was their way of thanking him for refusing to collaborate with the conquering German armies and for closing them despite German threats to his life when he did...

...While I chatted with P~re Touvi, a priest dressed completely in white who had been born in a Togolese village and studied in Rome, the children from the cathedral school were being dismissed for the day below Ptre Touvi's balcony...

...As we took the elevator, Bennett pointed out that the number of the floors skipped from three to eleven...

...Its aim is " t o awaken the national awareness of the masses and the e l i t e , " according to literature we were given...

...He proudly told us about his three wives and ten children and boasted that "men are on top in Africa...

...National Review calls us "first-rate" and Newsweek has conceded that we are "thoughtful," even praising our "childlike exuberance...

...Varnado, and Paul C. Vitz...

...Please allow 2 t o 8 weeks f o r d e l i v e r y o f f i r s t i s s u e . ) SPECIAL DISCOUNT RATES FOR FIRST-TIME SUBSCRIBERS E' One-year subscription...

...Even the "magisterial" New York Times has had to take notice...

...I am talking about the round-up of children between the ages of three and fifteen, children abducted at gunpoint and forced to accompany the Communist troops into Albania and Bulgaria, where they were inducted into camps to be brought up as Communists...

...But the day was busy enough...

...The book was a gift from a Swiss hotelier who owns an expensive new hotel in LomC According to its jacket, the book was "conceived by a European for Europeans," and in it the author writes rather fondly of the African ritual of roasting and eating a pet dog (a sacrifice of "something one loves...

...For the above-mentioned reasons the government should create an Interstate Commerce Commission to protect the American people from the evils of 'railroads' and to preserve the canals for posterity...

...I'm glad to hear thatl" Judy said, and a few minutes later she concluded into her tape recorder, "The women of America have much to learn from the women of Togo...

...That is why the NEW OXFORD REVIEW has made its appearance...

...When Tito fell out with the butcher at the Kremlin and closed his borders, the Greek Communist insurrection was doomed...

...It was any Greek who wasn't a Communist...

...One involved Eyadema's coming to the rescue of some fishermen whose boat had been menaced by a whale...

...There is a tenacious myth in America that says Catholics are stupid, ignorant, and superstitious...

...Assuming that any black woman at such a pricey place 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 (especially one in slacks) had to be a prostitute, a guard jumped out from behind a bush and chased poor Cleora...

...My conscience was salved by the knowledge that Evelyn Waugh took them all the time...

...The president climbed into a helicopter and personally shot the whale: quite a blow to the Save-theWhale sensibilities of a member of our group who had been singing Eyadema's praises all week long...

...The only thing I wonder about is whether it was worse to be among the 150,000 the terrorists butchered or among the surviving parents whose children were taken from them and turned into hard-core Stalinists, some of them still active both inside Greece and out...

...That night we had a drink at the Hotel du 2 F~vrier with John Bennett, a young, Harvard-educated Third Secretary at the U.S...

...Embassy...

...President, 'railroad' carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of t5 miles per hour by 'engines' which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children...

...Our house, which was located in the choicest part of the city, near the British embassy, had no heat, no electricity, and no running water...

...The horror of it is unspeakable, though not as unspeakable as the reaction to it of liberal-left elements...

...Women were held at an almost subhuman level...

...Embassy compound in search of asylum, the president is considered "good" by African standards...

...This may be why they get to drive about in Mercedes-Benzes...

...Yet it was they who tilled the land alongside their men, who herded, sowed and harvested, apart from doing the domestic chores and bringing up the children...

...I tried to obey the etiquette...

...German missionaries completed the cathedral in 1912...

...The economy is "mixed," but the president controls the army and the country's only political party, the Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais...

...A relief officer told me that there may be as many of 30,000 leprosy victims in Togo (population 2.3 million), and polio is still common...

...Our contributors include the best orthodox Catholicism has to offer: Francis Canavan S.J., Christopher Derrick, Joseph Fessio S.J., Paul H. Hallett, James Hitchcock, Msgr...

...The liberal Protestants have their Christian Century, the Evangelicals have their Christianity Today, the liberal Catholics have their Commonweal, and the Jews have their Commentary...

...The children sang some songs in French and then marched out, satchels in hands, to the beat of an African drummer...

...Two...

...We spent most of our time crouching on the floor and slept underneath our beds...

...Nick Gage left the Times in 1980 to devote himself to uncovering the murderers of his mother, and his recent book, Eleni,* tells her story...

...This novel experiment in creating pure Communists was called pedomazoma...

...Feminism is one Western Value that somehow doesn't apply in Africa...

...My impression was that the citizens of Togo see things differently...

...A , nother tacitly-agreed upon rule was that we were never, ever, to apply our Western Values to what we saw in Africa...

...Priests, civil servants, teachers, policemen, the well-to-do, anyone who was not a Communist sympathizer, was executed...

...Most of us had simply received an invitation from Togo's U.S...

...As far as I was concerned, it was a junket pure and simple...

...A small fact that the onetime employers of Nicholas Gage have never made as big a fuss about as, say, Watergate, or South Africa...

...Although only seven, I was already a veteran...

...Martin Van Buren Governor of New York Luckily for America, the leaders of Mr...

...Despite rumors that Eyadema personally shot his predecessor as the latter was climbing a wall into the U.S...

...Cleora, who works for a major midwestern daily, said she had come to experience her African roots...

...It turned out to be a funeral...

...Bombs didn't scare me as I had been hearing them drop for three years...

...We saw a young man sitting in a popular fetish market (a ghastly array of bird and monkey skulls and primitive sculptures), his nose eaten away by disease, but nobody gave him a second look...

...Although I was terribly tempted to twit my companions with Biimpish remarks ("Aren't the French marvelous to stay on here...

...Although he is a regular stop for tourists, the prince confused our group with a delegation from the U.N...

...Yet the effect of our visit to the Nana Benz was somewhat marred for the feminists by the repeated assertions of our regular hotel waiter that he was "a polygame...

...The hotel was named for the day in 1974 when President Eyadema nationalized one of the largest mining companies in Togo...

...What I minded was that as Christmas neared the incoming fire was being directed at us not from the sky, but from a hill three blocks away...

...Not even Genghis Khan would have gone so far...

...George A. Kelly, James Likoudis, Ralph Mclnerny, John T. Noonan Jr., Kevin Perrotta, James J. Thompson Jr., S.L...

...En Divinit~-M~decine Occult~-Libre...

...We drove down an alley in Lome and arrived at the comfortable residence of the Nana Benz...

...He also told me that the Church is growing rapidly in numbers in Togo--one Lom~ parish, for example, recently baptized 500 adults in a single day...

...But I was having bus phobia, and so decided to remain behind and explore Lomb-along with Togo's U.S...

...At his comment that he was in the process of seeking a fourth wife, Judy bristled...

...Unlike my father, Eleni wasn't equipped to defend her family against THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 33...

...The National Catholic Register has said that "for sheer feistiness and guts, it's hard to top the NEW OXFORD REVIEW...

...There wasn't much to eat, and Athens had become a nightmare city of skeletal figures searching for food, falling dead, and lying unburied...

...Hundreds of thousands of Greeks were murdered by the Communists that winter and over the next four years...

...A San Francisco freelancer named Sasha had come prepared...

...9 (regularly $14) [] One-year student or retired person's sub . . . . $7 (regularly $12) [] Three-year subscription...

...My father stationed himself inside the Italian armored personnel carrier he had managed to get his hands on after the Italian surrender in 1943...

...Boat builders would suffer and towline, whip and harness makers would be left destitute...

...Well," she said, "they sell horse meat on the streets of New York--at least this is fresh...

...One of the busiest spots in Lom~ was the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart--a place of such imperialistic relics as incense, genuflections, and stylized frescoes of traditional saints...

...Berkeley, CA 94706 CITY STATE ZIP CODE PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER dent...

...Van Buren's day, men of vision and hope, did not share his fears...

...funds) [-}, Sample c o p y . . . $3.50 Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW and mail to: NAME (Please print or type) STREET ADDRESS NEW OXFORD REVIEW Room 409-B 1069 Kains Ave...

...How typical that a feminist reviewing Eleni in the Sunday Times of London concentrated almost entirely on this aspect, as if Gage had written a lament for women's rights...

...It was just about that time that my father told us that his factories had been blown up by the Communists...

...This made her sulky for the rest of the trip...

...Although the Togolese government provides public education, families scrimp to send t h e i r children to Catholic schools...

...public relations woman and a Boston Globe reporter who was shee~sh about being on a junket...

...By this time, it was rather obvious that the hot topic with our group was the Status Of Women...

...Random House, $15.95...

...Well, the NEW OXFORD REVIEW has arrived on the scene to dispel those falsehoods...

...Their mothers were beaten for their lamentation and mourning...

...The day we left Togo we each received a copy of a gorgeously illustrated coffee table book entitled The Last Africans...

...When Communists occupied her northwestern village, Eleni immediately began planning an escape for her children...

...Lillian Hellman, a liar of mythological proportions, was defending Stalin while it was going on, and cocktail party girl propagandists like Christopher Hitchens prefer to blame the victims themselves for what the rewriters of Greek history call the civil war...

...Given that the annual per capita income is around $300, this was extremely difficult...

...We walked by rubbish heaps in the town of Togoville and drove past villages that would be considered appalling even in Appalachia...

...When some Togolese youths playfully surrounded our European touring bus, trying to sell a native goat-dish crawling with flies, Elaine looked on the bright side...

...My last memory of Togo: As we sat in the humidity of Lom~'s airport waiting for Air Afrique to take us back to New York, Elaine sneezed with a cold...

...When they came out in the open and were about to attack he let them have it with the machine gun he was manning...

...Elaine of Essence magazine, for example, was "distressed by the implications" of the continued French presence...

...The questions were routine until Judy, crouched on the floor and holding her mike up to the Nana Benz, raised the issue of feminism...

...Canal boats are absolutely essential to the defense of the United States...

...After all, it's said, there aren't even enough intelligent orthodox Catholics to support a decent journal of opinion...

...public relations representatives and had decided to take them up on the offer...

...Although Togo has been independent since 1960, the French are still everywhere in their white shorts and funny hats...

...His description of village life in Greece is flawless...

...Tape recorders and notebooks were dutifully brought to the ready...

...This was one display of Western Values that our guide, Mr...

...Cheerfully he explained his sensible formula for choosing his bed partner for the week: It is whichever wife does the cooking...

...Upon arrival in the piano bar on the " 3 5 t h " floor Bennett regaled us with some stories about the presif January 31, 1829 To: President Jackson The canal system of this country is being threatened by the spread of a new form of transportation known as 'railroads...

...More than fifty thousand children were taken from their mothers and marched to the Communist paradises bordering on Greece...

...official told me at a cocktail party that the French help keep the lid on things politically...

...Our Nana Benz, a plump, barefoot woman in her sixties, sat relaxed in an armchair...

...Judy turned to her and said, "You must be allergic to America...

...Judy, a pretty black NPR woman with cornrows, carried tape-recording equipment everywhere...

...Most of the country's roadside markets were manned by women, and women could be seen trudging along highways carrying gigantic loads on their heads...

...The Nana Benz stirred in her chair and replied that the merchants canvass for President Eyadema, promote his "ideologie," and try to let the people know that he is the "only salvation" for Togo...

...A Frenchman is included in the cabinet and is a personal adviser to President Eyadema--none of which went down very well with Sasha and several black reporters...

...A woman was asleep on the dirt in his courtyard (a common sight), and I tactlessly violated the group's "taboo" against noticing the obvious: I suggested this might be a sign of poverty...

...The few that he missed beat a hasty retreat...