FUBAR

It’s been eleven hours and three days since the AP called the Presidential election in favor of the man who held the office during the worst presidency we’ve ever had. Nothing compares 2 him, of course, but I think it’s safe to say the 2024 version of Trump will supplant the 2016-2020/early 2021 version. Many of us think this is a bad thing. However, in spite of what is to some of us a confusing set of numbers, it is clear that our next, sure to be even worse president seems to have gotten significantly more votes than his opponent, and he’s gotten them from people who one assumes do not think this is a bad thing. Which raises questions, such as Why do they not think it is a bad thing? and What is wrong with this country? and What the fuck?

I don’t know how to answer those questions (especially the last one, which isn’t really a question). But I do want to talk about the title of this post, which I swear has something to do with all of this: I went to a high school headed by a man whose (I hope but seriously doubt secret) nickname among the students was FUBAR. Not coming from a military family, this was how I learned what the old Army-originating term FUBAR meant or, more accurately, what some people meant by it. At that school in central New Jersey (you’re damn right it’s real, @njgov), we thought it meant Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.

I have learned at some point in the intervening almost forty years that some people think it means Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Merriam-Webster has it as Recognition. The Oxford English Dictionary also has it as Recognition (and includes the sanitized “Fouled” that even I, who do not come from a military family, know is a coverup).

The OED also tells us that the first recorded use of FUBAR in print was in 1944 in Yank, a weekly magazine produced for US soldiers during WWII. Yank was the idea of a man named Egbert White, who had worked for Stars and Stripes in the war before WWII, which nobody then knew to call World War I, so they just said it was a great war. The great war. Apparently the inclusion of a pin-up photograph was a big draw for the magazine, whose name, again, was Yank. White himself got yanked from the leadership of the paper over certain editorial decisions; you can read about it in his essay, “A Free Press in a Citizen’s Army,” which for some reason appeared in the Journal of Educational Sociology.

I never saw any evidence of FUBAR’s being actually fucked up, beyond repair or recognition. He was a genial and to me distant presence. He came to a track meet once and watched my race and had a chat with my mom. My sense is that FUBAR was just an old nickname that some boys a long time ago had given him because they were boys a long time ago. But I was as oblivious then as I am now, so who knows. I do know that before graduation my friend Taylor and I stole a personalized From the Desk of, &c. notepad off of his desk, and he found out about it some time later because I used a sheet from it to write a thank-you note to my college counselor, who helped me get into a much better college than I deserved to, and it was reported back to me that FUBAR was amused. He has been dead for a quarter century, as has my college counselor. I think I still have the rest of that pad somewhere, but I wouldn’t know who to write to using it.

I’ve gotten a little deeper into all of this than was strictly necessary because I’ve been putting off saying what I want to say about the bad thing that has happened: it’s really, really bad. I don’t need to go into how right now. As I said on here a couple of weeks before election day, Trump is a bully who’s never demonstrated he has any interest in right or wrong, the Constitution, or the welfare of other people. A few days after that, again on here, I was wondering about the effects of seeing a man like that on our ubiquitous screens, on us and especially on the youngest of us. And a couple of days ago I was thinking about my students’ reaction to what happened the day before. His presidency very well could be as much of a disaster for the people he’s conned into thinking he will take care of them as for the people who know he won’t. Most of my students seem to think it will be a disaster for them, for people they love, and for people they don’t know but don’t want to see hurt, and I can’t say they’re wrong.

My question for right now is which kind of FUBAR we are. Are we Fucked Up Beyond All Repair? Or are we just Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition? Is there a difference? Say it’s the latter. Many people are saying they don’t recognize their country anymore, seeing so many of their neighbors vote for someone they think we all ought to have rejected a long time ago. Is that the kind of FUBAR we are? If so, can we imagine the country becoming more like we thought it was, more like we want it to be? Can we hope that our neighbors will wake up to the reality of what just happened, to what the country will really be like under Trump 2, to what he will do to them too?

Or say it’s the former, that we’re Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. He’s packed the courts with people who don’t seem to care about the law except in terms of what it can do for certain people, classes, religions. He’s got legislators and captains of industry in line. He’s got journalists bothsidesing the apocalypse. (On tonight’s panel, for an opposing view, Satan.) He’s got some people scared and some people feeling they’ve been given permission not just to think but to say and do what they say we all are already thinking and have always wanted to say and do. (Except we weren’t, and we haven’t.) He’s got everything lined up for four years of unbridled meanness and limitless corruption.

Maybe the most important question for right now isn’t which kind of FUBAR we are. But maybe it is–maybe we can’t ask ourselves any other questions about what to do, or what we can learn from how we got here, or how we can end up somewhere better, until we answer that. And the answer won’t in the end be about facts. It will be about what we want to accept. Knowing how hard so many people worked for an outcome different from the one we have apparently gotten, I don’t think Beyond Repair is it.