I once stood in the middle of New York city watching my name go round the electronic zipper sign in Times Square and I felt pretty thrilled, but not quite as thrilled as I felt when I saw my name in the ‘Examiner’ for the first time.
Middle
There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.
Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.
In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.
America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.
What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.
The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.
Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became ‘pro’-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.A.’ s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive.
So I think we should stay focused on the real problem in the Middle East. It’s not Israel. It’s these dictatorships that are developing nuclear weapons with the specific goal of wiping Israel away.
By June 1974, Treasury Secretary George Shultz was already suggesting that rising oil prices could result in a ‘highly advantageous mutual bargain’ between the United States and petroleum-producing countries in the Middle East.