{"id":73,"date":"2003-03-22T13:27:00","date_gmt":"2003-03-22T17:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=73"},"modified":"2003-03-22T13:27:00","modified_gmt":"2003-03-22T17:27:00","slug":"the-biggest-gangsta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=73","title":{"rendered":"The Biggest Gangsta"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What this war is really about is George W. Bush showing the world that he is the biggest, baddest gangsta of them all. The war is a message, sent to everyone on the planet, and written in Iraqi blood: &#8220;I can do whatever the fuck I want, and you are powerless to stop me&#8221;&#8230;<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nJay-Z may call himself J-hova, but he could never get away with anything like this. Dubya is the ultimate frat boy, and white frat boys have long been into black &#8220;gangsta rap.&#8221; Black male rappers may have been using the music to usurp for themselves the authority and power and money that rich white men tend to possess; but insofar as these rappers merely state out loud the misogynistic cliches and boasts of self-entitlement that are ubiquitous (but often hidden) in the boardroom and the country club, they are just mirroring ruling class privilege back to its possessors, in a  stylized and exaggerated form. This is minstrelsy, in short. But the representation never matches the real thing; No rap battle will ever be able to match the ferocity, or the finality, with which Dubya puts down Saddam.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s also the matter of going it alone: &#8220;I did it my way.&#8221; You might say&#8211;in a properly sardonic tone&#8211;that, by so casually dismissing the opinions of the UN, the Europeans, and nearly the entire world aside from Tony Blair, Bush has done more to derail globalization than the legion of anti-corporate protesters who have been active around the world for the last several years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What this war is really about is George W. Bush showing the world that he is the biggest, baddest gangsta of them all. The war is a message, sent to everyone on the planet, and written in Iraqui blood: &#8220;I can do whatever the fuck I want, and you are powerless to stop me&#8221;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}