by Zack Furness

Back in the second grade, most kids I knew were completely preoccupied, if not irritatingly obsessed, with playing a game called ‘Opposite Day’. Since I’m currently trying to wean myself off the habit of searching everything imaginable into Google (the information-giving/imagination-crushing machine), I have no way of knowing whether Opposite Day was unique to my elementary school in Michigan, a global occurrence, or one of those strange practices that kids of my generation seemed to have shared across geographical boundaries and time zones...something akin to playing ‘Ice Cream Man’ with an overturned Big Wheel. Thus, a brief explanation is in order. So-called 'Opposite Day' is precisely what the name entails: it is a day when one’s statements are meant to be construed in completely opposite terms. Mind you, an entire day is actually quite a long event for a little kid, so Opposite Day can sometimes last for just a few hours, or even a few minutes. Indeed, a child simply has to declare "Opposite Day" and then all bets are off! Up is down, black is white, hate is love, war is peace, and so on. One can just tack the words onto any statement, thereby instantaneously undermining English semiotics and breaking the oppressive chains of 7-8 year old discursive norms. It is like the verbal version of Bakhtin’s carnival or the TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), though instead of briefly toying with social norms or one's class position, the main purpose is simply for sugar-saturated American children to fuck with each other, as in “You look pretty and I really like you...Opposite Day!” Translation: “You’re ugly and I hate your face.”

I call attention to the yet-to-be fully appreciated phenomenon of Opposite Day because I clearly missed out when someone...maybe an old woman in jest, or young boy in earnest...recently declared Opposite Day with such vigor, or at such a prodigious moment, that it tore a hole in the Chantilly lace of the space/time continuum and allowed for the seemingly Newtonian manifestation of this principle in the United States. Far fetched? Perhaps. But then how else does one explain the unexplainable series of events whereby an ostensibly good man (Barack Obama) travels around the country campaigning for president, fills a lot of people with Hope (see the prescient Bad Subjects #78), swears to uphold droves of important laws, and then ultimately proceeds in the exact opposite direction of said agenda??

Like plenty of other Lefties, I was neither smitten with President Obama’s campaign platform nor was I entirely cynical about the prospects of having a smart, capable person in the proverbial throne. In fact, I was actually impressed by him on several occasions, particularly when he delivered his Structural Racism 101 speech to the nation in March, 2008. It was one of the few things that made it easier to swallow the bitter pill of another 18th century style election in which ‘Mericans shun direct democracy in order to put their faith in arbitrarily selected delegates who have no legal obligation to vote in accordance with the wishes of their constituents. Thus, when Obama won the election, I was confident that he would initiate some of the few pseudo-progressive (though far from Leftist) reforms he laid out on the campaign trail, namely ending the war in Iraq. Yet in 2009, rhetorical gymnastics and hollow gestures toward ‘change’ are the calling cards of a PR-based administration that continues to legitimize illegal wars, preemptive military strikes, corporate tyranny, and the suppression of facts pertaining to U.S. war crimes. For example, putting an end to the ‘war on terror’ is supposed to mean something more than just getting rid of the phrase the ‘war on terror’. But then again, it's difficult to think in such pragmatic (some would say 'sane') terms when the following truisms are currently being (re)defined by the Obama administration:

‘Green Energy' = Coal and nuclear power.
‘Progress in Iraq’ = Continuing the privatization of Iraq's oil supply and adding to the pile of roughly 1.2 million dead Iraqis.
'Non-combat roles' = The positions that will be taken up by roughly 50,000 armed corporate mercenaries following the so-called 'pullout' of US soldiers from Iraq.
‘Defending the Rule of Law’ = Ignoring habeas corpus when it suits our interests, supporting the biggest prison system in the history of history, and continuing a long tradition of violating Native American treaties, thwarting reparations to African Americans, harassing brown people everywhere, and ignoring any pesky national or international laws we don’t like.
'Improving K-12 schooling' = Promoting the union-busting rhetoric of 'merit-based' performance and hiring former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan as the United States Secretary of Education. Duncan, who never attended Chicago Public Schools despite being born and raised in the city, has zero credentials as a teacher and has never worked in a classroom. Indeed, his only 'successes' stem from a track record of privatizing public schools and developing the most militarized public school system in the United States.

And the list could tragically go on (and on)...

Given the fact that Obama and his cabinet of war hawks and derivatives traders have set the bar several notches below mediocrity, my only wish is for them to at least be forthcoming with their Reaganite agenda instead of forcing everyone to sit through more speeches in which Opposite Day is the governing paradigm. Thus, it would be far more honest at this stage in the game for White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, to start shadowing Obama at every public appearance like the ever-present ‘hype man’ in 80s hip-hop. From this vantage point, Gibbs could make it much easier for viewers and listeners to truly understand the President by loudly uttering the phrase ‘Opposite Day!’ after each one of Obama’s eloquent statements, whether on the subject of closing Guantanamo, changing ‘politics as usual’, or helping out the folks on ‘Main Street’: the utopian non-place that rarely exists outside of Disney World or the scotch and pill-induced dreams of doughy white politicians who yearn for a ‘simpler’ time, i.e. a time when people who look like the President donned white gloves and catering trays and ended all of their overly-polite sentences with the words "Yes, Sir". Indeed, the recent rhetorical battles between Republicans and Democrats over ‘Main Street USA’ is a fitting metaphor for the vapid sloganeering that currently (and historically) passes for political dialogue in this supposedly ever-changing state of changeable change. That is to say, the core issue of capitalism’s abject failure is so far removed from analysis that few politicians or TV talking heads have even bothered to notice that the only thing left on ‘Main Street’ in most towns are boarded up storefronts, a few dilapidated convenience stores and the stripes on the blacktop leading to the local Wal-Mart Supercenter.

The dream-filled anarchist in me longs to see the Obama administration take up this straightforward and decidedly more entertaining vision of tag-team public address, though the realist in me sincerely doubts it will come to fruition. Either way, I do hold out hope for the time when people eventually grow weary of both the spectacle of capitalism and the childish paradigm of simply making things up and pretending they’re actually true.

Zack Furness is a member of the Bad Subjects Production Team and a professor at Columbia College Chicago. He is constantly rooting for the Dooger to crush leukemia so that he can get on with his business of fighting fires, writing sugary sweet pop punk tunes, and being a dad, a husband and general pain in the ass.