Grand Alliance—With Gomala

A Gift for Gomala, by John Baxter. Lippincott, $4.95 Gomala was a God-forsaken chunk of sub-equatorial jungle, populated by something over a million warring savages with a literacy rate of 2.2 per cent. The natives in its 41,382 square miles spoke eight distinct dialects, and its produce, such as it was, consisted of palm kernels and cocoa. Naturally, the State Department had been prompt to recognize the nationality of Gomala, and to endorse it for voting membership in the United Nations. And naturally, Washington’s morning newspaper demanded that substantial boodle be instantly lifted from the U.S. Treasury and given to this latest “emergent nation.”

John Baxter, author of A Gift for Gomala, has caught the drone of the Liberal editorial style so perfectly that it demands quotation. At the start of the story, the government employees who people this witty and well-written novel read in the Washington Post and Times-Herald that “last month a new nation took its place beside the others on the African continent; the new Republic of Gomala, only recently freed from long Colonial domination. Our hopes quite naturally are that Gomala will evolve democratically in stride with the West, but it cannot do so unaided. Its institutions are too new, its semiliterate populace as yet insufficiently aware of the boon of democracy. In Gomala the Department, indeed our entire government, has an opportunity to erase the mistakes of past favoritism to colonial powers, and provide an indispensable boost to this new and proud nation. The Foreign Policy Council has estimated that to exist Gomala needs immediate credits of no less than $175,000,000. Will the Department respond, or will it smugly ignore yet another chance to aid the growth of democracy in a young and uncertain republic?”

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A Gift for Gomala, by John Baxter. Lippincott, $4.95 Gomala was a God-forsaken chunk of sub-equatorial jungle, populated by something over a million warring savages with a literacy rate of 2.2 per cent. The natives in its 41,382 square miles spoke eight distinct dialects, and its produce, such as it was, consisted of palm kernels and cocoa. Naturally, the State Department had been prompt to recognize the nationality of Gomala, and to endorse it for voting membership in the United Nations. And naturally, Washington’s morning newspaper demanded that substantial boodle be instantly lifted from the U.S. Treasury and given to this latest “emergent nation.”

John Baxter, author of A Gift for Gomala, has caught the drone of the Liberal editorial style so perfectly that it demands quotation. At the start of the story, the government employees who people this witty and well-written novel read in the Washington Post and Times-Herald that “last month a new nation took its place beside the others on the African continent; the new Republic of Gomala, only recently freed from long Colonial domination. Our hopes quite naturally are that Gomala will evolve democratically in stride with the West, but it cannot do so unaided. Its institutions are too new, its semiliterate populace as yet insufficiently aware of the boon of democracy. In Gomala the Department, indeed our entire government, has an opportunity to erase the mistakes of past favoritism to colonial powers, and provide an indispensable boost to this new and proud nation. The Foreign Policy Council has estimated that to exist Gomala needs immediate credits of no less than $175,000,000. Will the Department respond, or will it smugly ignore yet another chance to aid the growth of democracy in a young and uncertain republic?”