Enlightened View of the Art of Mooning

The owner of the vanity license plates MOONEM, which have provoked some controversy, has surfaced, but asks not to be identified.

Obviously this owner, like those who practice mooning, prefers to express himself anonymously.

The question was raised, you may recall, by Zoila Conan Rickard, a reader who had protested MOONEM to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and who sent me the DMV’s reply, explaining why they would not recall the plates. (I found the reply literate and enlightened.)

The owner, a Los Angeles lawyer, writes: “While I would gladly extend an apology to Mrs. Rickard if she has been in any way offended by my environmental plate, I would with greater vigor extend my appreciation to Judi Fabretti of the Department of Motor Vehicles for her enlightened support.”

Anonymously, he asserts that MOONEM was “designed only to amuse.” He would not have chosen that message if he had thought it would be other than harmless. “The response from passers-by has been nothing but positive. I daily receive at least one honk and ‘thumbs up’ from a freeway neighbor, and occasionally, a friendly ‘moon’ from more gregarious comrades in fun.”

Mooning , by the way, is the act of displaying one’s unadorned posterior, usually from the rear window of an automobile or the window of a bus. (It obviously takes some gymnastic skill as well as impudence.) I said I couldn’t find the word in any of my dictionaries, including the recently published Thesaurus of Slang, by Esther Lewin and Albert E. Lewin.

“That’s a bad rap, Jack,” writes Mr. Lewin. “ Moon is there.” He points out that the book’s 150,000 slang words are listed under 12,000 standard English words. Moon , he points out, is listed under expose , uncover and buttocks . Indeed it is, right along with kazoo, tokus, gazonga, bum, rumble seat and numerous other evocative words for the human fundament.

Henry L. Scharff of Thousand Oaks suggests that the practice of mooning may have ancient pagan origins. Soon after World War II began, he recalls, he was stationed with a Marine detachment on Tutuila, near Pago Pago in American Somoa, because of its strategic value. They dug in next to a Samoan village and soon became friendly with the villagers.

“The girls were a comely and cheerful lot, clad in nothing more than a lava-lava--a bright cloth leading from the waist to the ankles. Nothing else anywhere, as we innocently discovered.”

When groups of girls walked by the Marines they inspired the usual badinage. “I’m sure the mostly unsophisticated teen-age Marines acted little differently than if the encounter had been in their home towns. But the girls had to show their disdain. . . . They did this by passing us by until their backs were toward us and raising the lava-lava to display bare behinds. . . . We saw no need to discourage it.”

Perhaps the motive of the Samoan girls was the same as that of the freeway mooner--to shock, embarrass and amuse--but, as Scharff suggests, in their case the result was more likely enchantment.

Nancy Wimberley of Apple Valley sends a clipping about a young mortician accused of robbing bodies of gold teeth and salable organs and stuffing them into ovens by the dozen. His vanity plates allegedly read I BURN 4U. Surely MOONEM is nicer than that.

But others are offended. Eileen Anderson of San Dimas complains that when a man got out of his truck, dropped his pants and exposed his posterior to her as she was on the way to work one morning, “somehow I had trouble differentiating it from other kinds of exposure I have been subjected to as a young girl and as a woman.

“But for more enlightened people like yourself obviously it’s cute and fun. Actually the mooning event happened on Avenue 52 near your home. I called the police. I should have called you for a good joke. Or better yet, maybe it was you out for a morning laugh.”

Mooning outside the confines of a moving vehicle is simple exposure, and should be punished. There’s no art in it; no physical skill, no humor; no astonishment; just depravity.

Anyway, as for the incident Ms. Anderson describes, I’m innocent. I have never mooned anyone on Avenue 52.

But surely it’s better to be mooned than shot at.