FCUK

FCUK is not the Federated Centers for Unified Knowledge at the Physics Department of the University of the Philippines, and definitely not the Fellowship of Christian Urdu Kaffirs of Uttar Pradesh. Nor is it a vocabulary test for my dyslexic SpEd students. The monosyllabic word is actually a very famous acronym for the boutique French Connection in the UK, with branches in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan.

I did a double take when I first saw a t-shirt at the Paseo de Marianas worn by a petite Japanese tourist daintily clad with a boldly, though perhaps, unwarily, risqué acronym-emblazoned attire. The seeming indifference the young lady exhibited over the funnily coincidental usage, Kimosabe, of the highly priced boutique item was refreshing in an island that still pretends that regulating the use of the f-word signifies refinement and good breeding.

Not too long ago, even our gaily irreverent sour grapes’ imbiber in Garapan, in relating an incident when his exasperated 4-year-old son cussed CUC to high heaven for yet another power outage, he surprisingly conformed to the literary device of identifying “expletive deleted” to characterize his son’s displeasure.

The continuing veiled appearances of a term used liberally every second on the second on the Southside of Chicago, and equally prominent on the lips of fellow educators and colleagues in the lunchroom and staff lounge, adds to its power. Lyrics to rap music that even 6th graders listen to are replete with repetitive adumbration of the term. One song titled, “I want to love you,” popularly listened to by the preteeners a year ago, had a second version that replaced a word, and caused not an innumerable guffaws from the boys and giggles from the girls.

Last year, for having uttered variations of the term three times, I was hauled to the school administrator’s office twice, resulting in a letter of reprimand permanently in my record for having been warned to stay clear of the verboten word and failing to comply.

It did not matter that the first time it occurred was when a student used the f-word on his classmates, and I repeated his words directly addressing it back to him, taking the pedagogical opportunity of asking whether he liked the term being directed at him at all. That did not endear me to the child, nor to a self-appointed sentinel of morality, a member of the teaching staff who relishes an oversight role to other teachers’ behavior and pronouncements, albeit in a rather displaced marmish hypocritical way

Of course, prominent 20th century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had long ago reminded us that the meaning of a term is in its use, which by now should have demythologized the tyranny and power of forbidden words, though that paradigm shift has still to occur to the guardians of propriety. Our young has since taken to decorating their sports car windshields with elaborate calligraphic Swedish-looking words as a means to express their displeasures, and flaunt their disdain for archaic convent morality.

Vulgarity of words is, however, hardly our main concern here. Valuable as it is to defang the inordinate power of formerly perceived crudity, we might look at the reality of the concrete vulgarity, life-threatening offense, political impropriety and economic indecency that has suddenly visited the health of our pocketbook values. And I do not mean the practices that occur behind the privacy of bedrooms between and among consenting adults.

The frequency of the f-word today is heard, deeply felt, and profoundly meant in many places unaccustomed to the resonance of its utterance, from middle class living rooms to hardwood paneled corporate boardrooms, from the hallowed halls of Congress to the corridors of kindergarten hallways, from the din of the street corner diners to even the tight circle of our deep sea divers.

In the most arrogant display of snake oil salesmanship, American taxpayers are again being asked to foot the bill for an economic bailout of our collapsed banking and investment institutions unprecedented since the stock market crash of ’29. We are being asked to hand Mr. GWB a blank check of almost a trillion dollars so that we can nationalize our corporate loses while still keeping in a few hands the concentrated wealth of the nation. We socialize the pain and privatize the gain.

This obscenity is worse than what is transpiring in emptying of the drawers of the Social Security System. Already, we are eating into our Commonwealth Retirement Funds even as we fail to remit to its accounts what it is due, but this is not even a drop in the bucket compared to the crow we have to eat over the failure of the global economic system that our Friedman boys from Chicago and the combined strength of the oil-coveting military-industrial complex have foisted over the economies of the world.

(Saying this will get me more than an administrative reprimand on my files. Already, anyone who as much as raise an eyebrow on our extended military incursion in Iran and ineffective strategies in decommissioning al-Qaida in our Afghanistan excursion, or mention the unheralded and hardly accountable 700-some military presence we fund around the world, can expect to be labeled unpatriotic, especially with the sudden ascendancy of GOP’s gun-toting, flag waving Sarah Palin and her newly awakened retinue.)

I shudder when I hear McCain insist that the fundamentals of our economy are sound. In 1995, Nick Leeson, operating out of a cubicle in Singapore, bankrupted the century-old European Barings Bank by some ill-conceived, ill-timed, investments in derivatives. The American economy that rules the global economy trade in the currency of mirages and illusions. Since we took our footing off merchandise production in the ’60s and dove into financial services and information technology as our economic toehold, watchful of quarterly bottom lines and awarding immediate commissions on those who can sell more unsecured securities and insured risks, we legitimized Ponsi crimes of persuasion with programmable cyclical collapses as a consequences of the schemes and scams. Those are the capital “Ds” that drove the Enrons and AIG to the ground but is the mainstay of contemporary economics and the fodder for the public and private cronyism, kleptocracies, and Abramoffs of our time.

For the man on the street, consider even the small “d” derivatives. Soda pop, carbonated sugar water manufactured at a cost of, at most, 3 cents, cost me a dollar at the vending machine. The $15 spent to make Nike shoes in Indonesia costs me $180 when it is on sale at FootLockers. There is real value and virtual value. We traffic on virtual values. Unfortunately, when our schemes go sour, our losses are not virtual.

I hope our presidential hopefuls will see that distinction in their debates. But given the fact that the funding of both is derived from the same source, I do not think either one will have anything substantial to say that might enlighten and alleviate the pain in my pocketbook. In any case, the vulgarity of our current situation abides, and I am royally pissed! Fcukingly!