If Brother JC Arzu were to stop calling for the Queen to hand up her throne in Belize, I would be his number one disciple. The brother really has a lot of major league talent. I don’t know if he was at the top of his class when he was in school, but if he wasn’t, I bet he would have been if he had wanted to. The wisdom of JC is on par with anyone in the world, except for his fault.

You know none of us is without sin, and none of us is without a weak sphere, a fault line. Before I go on, let me get this clear that I am not pushing up myself, with my finding fault with a man whom I consider brilliant. For one, I’ll say you don’t have to be very smart to know someone is slipping up when you see it. All of us have big enough brains inside our heads and yes, some are superiorly wired, but all of us inherited some of the glory.

The second reason I can’t be accused of seeking glory is that I’m not alone in my perception. If we can believe the things people say and do, then there are legions out there who hold the view that I have.

I know JC does great work in the technical side at KREM because he is only discussed in superlatives. My knowledge of his thoughts comes from listening to him when he is on set with Tony Wright, when he lets off during one of his music shows, from reading his thoughts in the pages of the Amandala, and sometimes on Facebook, and in very brief discussions I’ve had with him.

I can’t chat with the brother too long, because he only speaks English (I suppose he speaks Garifuna when he is down in PGee). Yes, he only speaks English, and he is daam sophisticated. I bet he could hold a long bench conversation with Jules Vasquez, another guy who knows to speak. Me, I am discomfited, feel very awkward, when I talk to elite speakers, and JC is one of those.

I suspect he is an evolutionist. The best description of that crowd is that they wholesale believe every bit of news that debunks the 7-days creation story. I bet a brother like him wouldn’t gag if he read this Yahoo story last week about some gadget they have that picked up radio waves (or something like that) a couple billion light years away. I have no doubt he’ll believe that. In my books that light years chatter falls under trivia, of no consequence, a conversation piece. I don’t work up a sweat over stuff like that.

That billion light years stuff is just a hocus pocus to snare the gullible. I don’t believe that JC is deliberately in on this game, but it’s a sport for some folk. Many people who have a little knowledge show off with it. It doesn’t matter the level. The child in Standard 3 will want to run rings around the child in Standard 2, and so it goes.

Whoa, when the world gets bored with radio waves, they’ll announce that for sure they’ve found evidence of life. They will not be able to prove it, and we won’t be able to disprove them.

My big disappointment with JC is his insistence on calling for the Queen to quit as head of Belize. The argument of JC, and these play bad fellows like Bill Lindo, Rufus X, Richard Bradley, and Patrick Rogers, is that the Queen is a joker in the deck and she is messing up things. Those philistine bohgaz say the Queen’s face shouldn’t be on our dollar, our leaders shouldn’t swear allegiance to her when they take office, and if we don’t make the change our leaders will forever serve interests other than ours.

Like it or noh like it, the British are our number one allies. If you happen to not know that, go and read the UN document when we got our independence. We are a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. We are just a little country; we will never achieve greatness as an in-your-face world power.

We have to pay for all the things we get in this life. We have to pick our poison. It’s the Eagle, the Bear, or the Commonwealth. God save our gracious Queen …

Here’s how I see this show. It’s like a card game. You are dealt a hand, and that’s the hand you have to work with. It’s amazing how some people can extract twice the value others would from the same hand.

I give no local leader any kind of pass because on taking office they swear allegiance to the great Queen. If the British want to pay her royally, that’s not my business. We have our own royalty here, and they are running wild with the contracts and so forth that are paid for with our tax money, and loans we have to pay for.

Funny thing, JC doesn’t want the Queen as head of our state, but he’d make a great Englishman. He is some smooth operator. If we both won lottery tickets to visit Buckingham Palace, he’d comport himself beautifully, with class, dignity, like he belongs with those “up there” people, while I’d be asking directions for the nearest pub.

JC is a Garifuna Belizean, and my feeling is that he is holding grudge. We cannot forget how dastardly the British treated our Garinagu brothers and sisters in St. Vincent, and when they brought them to Honduras they put them on a stony island. The sense I have, my piece of truth, is that the leaders of the Garinagu didn’t hold malice, that they took their punishment as a consequence of losing the war with the British.

I will not go into the reasons why the British, when they were master, prevented the Garinagu and the Kriol from interacting, and even encouraged division between the tribes, as many historians have pointed out, but it is a fact that when the Garinagu came to Belize they lived freely in their villages, and they found work in the mahogany forests.

 All is not always as it seems. Truth comes in many pieces, and it is only when we have the entire package that we should pronounce what we know as fact. There are times when you have to make decisions, and all you have to go on are pieces of truth, but in the normal run of the day we should cut some slack.

In that vein I want to retell this story. A brother from Seine Bight told me that George Price founded the village of Georgetown after Hattie, and he wanted them to relocate. The brother said he believed that Price wanted to give Seine Bight’s beautiful beaches to people in the tourism business. I told him, maybe so, all things are possible under the sun, but he should consider Price’s terror of hurricanes, after nearly dying in 1931. I don’t know if I remembered to tell the brother that George Price also had no liking for tourism.

Aha, the folk from Seine Bight ended up with their feet on two villages. They kept the glorious seaside, and they also populated Georgetown, where they grow the wonderful ground food and greens to prepare along with the fish, and grow the wonderful fruit trees to make the juice for the wash-down.

The truth I have doesn’t pay for this beef with the Queen. For me it’s a non-issue. Even the biggest, most powerful countries need allies. It is the way of the world that you pay for what you get. Our focus should be entirely on our leaders, and how they play the hand they are given.

I know, I know that those who want to retire the Queen are after a republican-type system. My thing is that I put no blame on the Queen for our painful failure with parliamentary democracy.

Hip, hip, HOORAY!

Thank you, thank you, Mayor Bernard Wagner, for your rousing speech to the nation on the 221st celebration of the 1798 Battle.

Respect to Memorial Park, but I think that next year the ceremonies should be taken to Battlefield Park, to hallowed ground, where our leaders historically made their stand for workers’ rights, for independence, and for freedom, justice and equality. Okay, the later fighters moved to Court House Wharf, but that probably was only because the crowds grew too big for the old battle ground. Hip, Hip! HOORAY!

DPM Faber, no congratulations for his enunciation – he for sure won’t get a job at the Coca Cola Spelling Bee after he leaves office – but congratulations for his promise to lobby for full recognition of Emancipation Day. Hip, Hip! HOORAY!