On Friday morning sometime after 10 I received a phone call from my dad. The son of a mutual friend of ours was doing a school paper or something, and wished to ask me a few questions. I arranged to have the young man call my home around 11 a.m., when I would be there.

A writer in one of the two PUP weekly newspapers was looking back recently, nostalgically, to George Price’s so-called “big tent” approach to his party politics. Mr. Price succeeded in holding together disparate elements in the PUP through much of the 1970s and into the early 1980s. One reason was that his reputation for electoral success was enormous. But another reason was that during those specific years, British-owned BEC was no longer a critical force in Belizean politics, and octopus Ashcroft had not yet arrived. So that, where the British were concerned, this period where Mr. Price’s “big tent” approach was presumably so successful, was an interregnum, so to speak. Ashcroft is the British, and Albion is back in Belize. Big time.

I was raised as a Roman Catholic, which is the main reason I became a fan of the University of Notre Dame football team when I was a child. The other reason was that where the United States Armed Forces short wave radio broadcasts were concerned in the mid/late 1950s, the college football team which was most often featured on Saturday afternoons was ND.

When an opportunity arose for my second son to enter politics in 1994, I did not have a problem with his becoming a People’s United Party official. I had spent time over the years thinking about who I was, in the sense of political philosophy, and I knew that I was more PUP than UDP. I am referring now to the original philosophy of the PUP, not the thinking which has dominated the PUP since 1989.

When I bought an old printing press from Norman Bouloy (deceased) for $200 in 1971, the Chandler and Price machine was moved from Benex Press on Nurse Seay Street to 46 Euphrates Avenue. Galento X Neal, a UBAD officer, had rented the Euphrates place for his tailoring business, and UBAD/Amandala later got the other half, or Galento gave us half. It’s a long time ago, and I’m not sure.

There were days, perhaps even weeks, during the time of the Heads of Agreement uprisings (1981) in Belize when it appeared to me that Belize had been cut off from the rest of the world, that no one outside really knew of how dangerous and explosive Belize had suddenly become, and, finally, that those who did know, did not care.

Let’s not fool ourselves. There is a real question about the future status of Belize as a country, and what contributes to the reality of that question is not only the Guatemalan claim to Belize, but the weak nationalism of the Belizean people.

Defenders of the Rt. Hon. George Cadle Price have always argued that where he appeared to be otherwise than he should have been, so to speak, it was because he was fighting against a reactionary, established, pro-British element on the domestic political scene. The argument has some validity, but the question then has to be, what about when Mr. Price’s power was at its peak in the 1960’s, why did it seem that his attitude towards Guatemala was conciliatory, and why did young black people feel uncomfortable, to put it mildly, with his “vibes”?

Next Tuesday, November 17, KREM Radio will be marking its twentieth anniversary of broadcasting. In my immediate family’s context, the story of KREM is more the story of my dad (in retirement), C. B. Hyde, and my eldest son (in his youth), Mose Hyde, than it is my story. In the context of UBAD activism, KREM is more the story of Rufus X than it is my story. And, finally, the story of the nuts and bolts of KREM is more the story of J. C. Arzu than it is my story.

Firepower is sure enough a hell of a thing. On Thursday at Fort Hood, Texas, the largest military base in the United States, one man with two automatic handguns killed 13 people and wounded about 30. That’s about what we know so far.

Fans of Kremandala will remember that after last year’s Christmas break, the Kremandala Show did not return to the airwaves for months. In fact, I actually taped a radio message to say that we had decided to scrap the show, after fourteen years, because it had completed its mission.

The Haulover Bridge and the approaches to it are classic British colonialism. The bridge itself was built without the future in mind. I mean, the thing is so narrow. That’s bad enough. But the Haulover approaches were built without the future or the present in mind. Damn, you don’t have to be an engineer, just a driver, to know that the approaches to a bridge are supposed to be substantially wider than the flooring of the bridge itself. The Haulover’s approaches are so tight, a taste of Madonna, it’s a wonder there aren’t more accidents there.

“He (Musa) already carries the heavy burden for turning Mr. Price’s monolithic and unmatched political machine into a scrap of twisted and barely functioning parts, during his tenure.”

Compared to when I started out in 1969, these days it’s kinda fashionable to be a black leader. Some call themselves Kriol. It was just UBAD in those early days. Today, there’s a lot of black chatter in bourgeois places. One of the reasons for this is that the power structure needs “reliable” people to represent the black community and speak for the black community, people whom it can control.