According to William Safire, the word 'moonbat' appeared in two Robert Heinlein short stories in the 1940s, but it became a political epithet in the late 1990s. It replaced 'looney left' as the chief epithet to hurl at anyone left of center (or even at centrists), and all this invective raises the question: why would anyone call himself a "moonbat"?
In 2008, some residents of Arlington, Massachusetts formed the Menotomy Moonbats "to represent the positive ideals embodied in the term 'Moonbat'" and invited others "to fly with us." "We are a community-oriented group that believes in open dialog to get ideas out so that people can discuss and decide for themselves."
They sold t-shirts and coffee mugs.
Getting into the humor of the thing, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr warned, "a moonbat is not something you want to be, even in Arlington." Carr admitted, "I don’t own the word 'moonbat,' but I have had custody of it for a good long while now," and defined moonbats as "trust-funded, medicated, middle-aged, white-guilt-ridden blogging lefty losers who inflicted Deval Patrick upon the working people." Similarly, the right-wing site Moonbattery.com quipped, "the Menotomy Moonbats have yet to transcend capitalism in their quest for socialist utopia."
Calling yourself a moonbat gets attention. And with luck, you might get someone's goat.
The Menotomy Moonbats combine three characteristics common among people who turn epithets into monikers.
In 1906, President Teddy Roosevelt complained about journalists "who make indiscriminate assault upon men in business or men in public life," comparing them to The Man with the Muck Rake of Paul Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: "the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of spiritual things." Unfazed by being called dung collectors, investigative journalists proudly assumed the moniker muckraker.
Here's another example. Queer used to mean "strange, odd, peculiar ... of questionable character ..." By the Nineteenth century, it meant "out of sorts" or even in trouble: if your finances turned sour, you could be on Queer Street. About a hundred years ago, 'queer' started to mean 'homosexual', and it was a routine adolescent epithet by the time I was growing up. Adolescent epithets are fair game, and in 1990, a group of AIDS activists founded Queer Nation.
The adoption of 'queer' was not pure defiance: humor and marketing were certainly involved. During the last two decades, the gay rights movement has certainly made enormous progress, and perhaps the use of the word 'queer' played a part in it. But only some gay rights people used the word, and even then often gingerly.Despite the humor, defiance, and marketing, the word hasn't been accepted the way epithets have been embraced in those great fields of comedy, melodrama, and self-promotion that are the arts. Here are two examples.
First artistic example. In 1874, Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise appeared in a show organized by the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers. Monet painted with very broad, very visible brush strokes, as opposed to tiny, smooth strokes of respectable art of the time:
Not everyone liked it - after all, it took an Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers to get Impression, Sunrise displayed. The critic Louis Leroy wrote that "I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it ... and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape" (see his Exhibition of the Impressionists). Monet's colleagues couldn't resist, and this kind of painting was soon being called 'impressionist'.
Artists are often proud of how ... edgy ... they are, and how they are standing up to the stodgy oppressive establishment. This is part posturing and part marketing (many collectors keep a sharp eye out for the next hot thing), but occasionally it is a result of stodgy oppression by the establishment.
Here is our second artistic example. In 1903, several young French artists launched an annual exhibition, the Autumn Salon, for displaying works that the stodgy, oppressive Paris Salon wouldn't touch. (Notice that edgy artists often protest by organizing exhibitions - which make money by selling the art.) The 1905 exhibition featured several paintings by students and followers of Professor Gustave Moreau of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, including Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat:
The brush strokes were broad and visible and called attention to themselves. "Donatello among the wild beasts," grumped the art critic Louis Vauxcelles. 'Fauve' being 'beast' in French, the 'fauvist' movement was named. (Vauxcelles later described a painting by Georges Braque as "full of little cubes", and 'cubism' was similarly named.)
Of course, these are examples from politics and the arts; one would not expect this sort of behavior in, say, the sciences. Or would one? When George Gamow championed George Lemaitre's 'nucleosynthesis' theory that the visible universe had begun with an 'explosion' of a 'primeval atom', the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle appeared on BBC radio, deriding the proposal as the 'big bang' theory. Then two Bell lab scientists tripped over confirming evidence and won the Nobel Prize for their good luck, and the 'Big Bang Theory' it is.
Making epithets into monikers is a way of fighting back, but with good humor so that things don't get too hot. It is also a way of pointing out the hyperbole and bad manners of one's opponents. And it is good theatre, which appeals to the ham in each of us.
So of course, liberals (at least those with a sense of humor) are going to proclaim themselves proud moonbats. And since humor is widely distributed, one would expect similar reactions to epithets hurled at the Right. The best epithet for the Right seems to be 'wingnut', named after a kind of bolt nut with 'wings' allowing it to be readily tightened or loosened by hand. Right wing people have picked it up, e.g., Rick Moran's Right Wing Nuthouse, but many presumably apolitical people have as well, from tattoo parlors to the Wichita wingnut baseball team. For those who feel competitive, on 9 May 2012, Google counted "about 1,210,000" hits for 'liberal moonbat' and "about 3,460,000" for 'right wingnut', further evidence (a thought that would appeal to both sides) (which tells you something about both sides) that the wingnuts are winning.
But we moonbats are very stubborn. So with no further ado, this is a site with information about moonbats, wingnuts, mugwumps, and other political beasts. This is not a blog - I'm too lazy and self-absorbed to handle comments - but rather a site of opinions, occasional facts, links, and other resources. I hope it proves interesting and occasionally useful.
-- 1 July 2012
