FUBAR

FUBAR names a condition of disorder so complete that things are damaged beyond recognition. Rabo Karabekian recalls the term from the war and turns it against the postwar faith in technological miracles: the very progress advertised as a triumph becomes the force that wrecks his art and helps make his life feel irretrievably disordered.

Wartime Meaning

Rabo says that during the war, soldiers used FUBAR as an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition.” The phrase gives extreme disorder a blunt, practical name, grounded in the experience of a world disrupted by war. Its later force comes from Rabo’s decision to carry that military language into civilian life.

The Postwar Promise Turns

Rabo describes the years after the Second World War as an age of miracles. Instant coffee, DDT, nuclear energy, antibiotics, improved fabrics, and the prospect of family helicopters all signaled a future in which technology would solve old problems and make life easier. The exuberance of these promises is part of the irony: in Rabo’s telling, the planet has become FUBAR not despite these miracles but through their unchecked consequences.

Sateen Dura-Luxe and the Ruined Paintings

The phrase becomes personal in the early 1960s, when acrylic wall paint destroys Rabo’s paintings. The paint, Sateen Dura-Luxe, had been advertised as having colors that would outlast the smile of the Mona Lisa. Instead, unforeseen chemical reactions involving the canvases’ sizing, the acrylic paint, and the colored tapes cause the works to destroy themselves. Paintings that had sold for fifteen, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars leave blank canvases and debris behind. The brand disappears from the market; Rabo remarks that a local paint dealer with any experience would laugh at someone who asked for it.

Reach and Resonance

FUBAR links the disorder of wartime to a civilian catastrophe produced by postwar technology. Its meaning is not abstract: the acronym becomes a compact measure of the distance between confident promises of progress and what those promises can actually do. For Rabo, the failed paint is a defining instance of a larger condition in which the new and supposedly miraculous can undo what it was meant to improve.