Hold on a second, I'm just hearing something on the news ... apparently some actual pirates terrorized an American freighter and held its captain at gunpoint? Arrr ... ar ... hmmm. Somehow now pirates are now less fun and hilarious. (And I should also stop putting my news on a one-week time delay. I don't know why I do that.)
I should explain here. I noticed a while ago that pirates were becoming a hi-LAR-ious cultural touchstone, particularly among Internet dorks. Maybe it was the fault of "Pirates of the Caribbean" -- I think it actually goes back to the Sea Captain character on the Simpsons -- but dorks have been finding endless hilarity in pirates for a while. (Among Internet dorks, the latest hilarious cultural touchstone is bacon. No joke. Man, I should really write a whole history and taxonomy of American nerd culture in the 21st century. Some people probably think it's still big glasses and pocket protectors, but it's blossomed into a massive, varied cultural tapestry, complete with a wide range of subcultures.)
The pirate fascination always struck me as 1) annoying -- pirate voices are extremely easy to do and extremely lame (imagine your boss coming up to you and going "Arr! Avast ye swabs for a team meeting at 10!" and you'll understand what I'm saying) and 2) a little odd, considering that pirates were the terrorists of their day. They boarded ships, killed people, took their stuff -- they were, by definition, horrible people.
The "pirates are fun" thing even stretches into kids' programming -- ever seen a show called "The Wiggles"? It's absolutely dreadful, so don't. It's a bunch of hammy Australian men wearing brightly colored shirts and singing terrible songs with a painful degree of enthusiasm. Kids love it, of course -- for kids, there's no such thing as "too enthusiastic."
Point is, one of the Wiggles plays a funny pirate, complete with an eyepatch and pegleg and whole getup. I would watch it and marvel at how pirates are now considered so harmless and fun that they can be on goofy kids shows, when they were once the nightmare of the world. And I wondered if someday kids' shows will have a fun and harmless terrorist. Some goofy, fun guy with dynamite strapped to his chest telling kids to brush regularly, that kind of thing.
Anyway, thanks to the Somali pirates, the pirate trend has presumably suffered a sudden heart attack and died. I owe them a debt of gratitude for that. Though, I admit, my first reactions to the Somali piracy story were more like:
"What the fuck? Do they know who they're dealing with? Do they not get newspapers? This is the United States of Fucking America you're dealing with, hotshot. We destroyed an entire country just because some guy told us their leader got yellowcake from Niger. And we don't even know what yellowcake is!"
And then when I heard that Navy Seals shot 'em all, my nice, liberal, Amnesty-International self got dropped to the curb and I said:
"Fuck yeah, bitches! U! S! F! A! U! S! F! A!"
And it's sad the people had to die, etc., etc. But c'mon, if there's one time we can satisfy a little bloodlust, it's against pirates. Now we just need to go after the Wiggles. (Post script: One of the Wiggles actually did die recently. So that's not funny. Not that it was anyway.)
5 comments:
I felt the same way when I heard the news about the Somali pirates. I felt bad for them. Did they really think the Navy Seals would give them 1 million dollars and let them row away in their dinghy?
Another interesting aspect is that the pirates in literature and popular culture are always more exploring new lands, looking for buried treasure and fighting with each other, and not boarding the ships of innocent people, killing them and stealing everything on board. I don't think most people even know what pirates are.
You know, Ed, I think your terrorist-as-humorous-sidekick snark is indeed a prediction of the future. Look at the Nazis. Everyone loves to hate the Nazis, so much so that they're emerging into funny caricatures (I'm thinking of the various Nazi doofs in the Indiana Jones movies).
My son is currently learning about pirates from a Richard Scarry book about some pie-stealing rats ("pie-rats"). Heaven only knows how this next generation will perceive pirates with introductions such as this.
The Indiana Jones movies might make Nazis seem more harmless than they really were, but at least they aren't shown as good guys in any sense. They're the butt of ridicule, which might de-fang them in a slightly inappropriate manner, but doesn't make it possible to identify with them, and that's the key, I think.
Meanwhile, I think we'll all be fine without pirates as one of the fun caricatures for kids. There's still cowboys and Vikings and Belgians and all the rest. It's sort of like losing Pluto as a planet, in a way. We grew up with them, sure, but we won't really be the poorer without them.
Hmmm, I guess I'm an outcast. I actually have a wall calendar here at work about pirates (it looks all old-timey map-y and cool) and tells you all about their lives and what they did. I wanted a cute calendar about kittens or something, but I went to Barnes and Noble on like January 15, so the choices were a little slim.
Second...I was a history major in college and I did my senior thesis on pirates. So I guess I love me some (old-timey) pirates. These new ones have got to go.
But those old-timey pirates were pretty brutal, no? Lots of killing and stealing and not a lot of buried treasure stuff.
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