Governor Moonbeam

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Fadi from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

So I had a question about a recent kind of sparring between a couple of politicians.

That’s the governor of California and the president, the latter, called the former Moonbeam on Twitter.

So I got to thinking, I didn’t know why he was called Moonbeam.

And so I researched it and realized that the governor had been called Moonbeam in the past.

But I still didn’t know why he was called that and why is it supposed to be derogatory.

That’s a wonderful question.

The reason that I like it is because it has all these cultural understandings that I think we’re all going to get as Californians and people who maybe grew up with Jerry Brown or at least have known about him.

But if you’re from Indiana and you sound like English isn’t your first language, is that right?

English is my second language.

And so I had to do some digging.

I went to even the Urban Dictionary online and still didn’t really give a definitive answer.

The short version is this.

He got the nickname from a Chicago newspaper columnist named Mike Royko.

And Mike was a great columnist, fantastic.

He’s cut from the old cloth, the blue collar guy who could say in a few words that it would take other people pages to do.

He just really understood people and he understood the cultural and political interplay between the different layers of American society.

And so when Jerry Brown first came onto the national scene early to mid 1970s,

Mike Royko kind of slapped this movie label on him to suggest that Jerry Brown was kind of from the hippie culture,

The just kind of looking too far into the stars and not paying attention to the practical realities of the world

And talking about airy, fairy things instead of practical day-to-day realities of getting down to work

And doing the business that needs to be done and just the meat and potatoes stuff.

And maybe suggesting a little bit of crystals and rainbows.

Insubstantial is the term.

Yeah, insubstantial, yeah, and kind of a vague spirituality

Without actually having a religion, that sort of thing.

And certainly the other thing about the nickname Moonbeam

Is it’s very much like actual names that were given to some kids

In the days of the hippie movement in the 1960s and the 1970s

Where they were given these names like Star Child or I can’t even think of all the ones now,

But there are a ton of these names that are collected here.

And the rainbow was a common name or to name somebody Tree or different things like that.

And to suggest a greater connection to the Mother Earth or to nature as a whole

Or to this large universe that we’re all a part of, you know.

So really it was a really effective single word way to paint Jerry Brown as one of these hippie leftist Californians who just didn’t get the real world and was off in outer space paying attention to his own fingernails and not to the work that needed to be done.

That’s very interesting.

If you read Jerry Brown’s thoughts on the nickname Moonbeam, he’s wavered over the many decades.

He’s had these two separate sessions as governor of the state.

He’s about to finish here in California at the age of 80.

He’s wavered between really embracing the nickname and kind of loving the fact that he does appreciate this quirkiness that Californians have.

They will strike off in their own direction and do their own thing regardless of what the rest of the country is doing.

And on the other hand, sometimes he just felt it pigeonholed him too much, and people didn’t appreciate that he’s been capable of putting the state back on a good budget and doing the hard work of building freeways or fixing the infrastructure or solidifying the things that we all need on our everyday lives to be successful.

So he was able, in a way, to reappropriate it?

Sometimes.

To reappropriate the name?

Yes, sometimes.

Okay, very good.

Good way to put it.

Fadi, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you so much.

We really appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

We know there’s something you hear every day that you don’t quite understand.

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