Argh! I Can't Root For Pirates Anymore!

As a little kid who spent most of his day in his room playing with either Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures or my Pirate-themed Lego sets, I feel like this new phenomenon of pirates being in the news on a regular basis should have been a development I welcomed.

Even when I was little, I always knew pirates were not exactly the noblest of beings. They plundered and murdered, but somehow to me as a youngster playing with Legos they seemed like the good guys. The stuffy looking British soldier characters weren’t fun to make voices for; the eye-patch wearing, hook wielding buccaneers were where my imagination could run wild. They were the toys which would always emerge victorious in my fantasyland, and the Lego models I would most beg my parents to buy me.

The “Pirates of the Caribbean” trilogy only further enhanced this stoic view of pirates for me. Jack Sparrow’s swashbuckling crew was funny, daring and brave. Their opposition seemed cowardly, merely interested in making money for themselves and maintaining their created hierarchy. Pirates were adventurers, men and women who sought to make their own way, rules be damned. Box offices sales agreed with me; pirates were cool and worth cheering on in their epic adventures. They were lovable renegades, the perfect antihero for a century seemingly removed from the atrocities of pirates like Blackbeard.

Up until this past summer, if the news talked about pirates they usually were reporting on teenagers downloading music illegally. But now pirates in the news are the real deal.

In 2008, 92 ships have been attacked in and around the Gulf of Aden, a waterway which separates Somalia and Yemen. Fourteen of such ships are still in control of the Somali pirates, with around 250 prisoners unaccounted for on those ships. Recently, the pirates have intercepted tons and tons of wheat and $100 million worth of crude oil. The Somali government can’t do anything about the problem either. Calling the current Somali government ineffective could probably be viewed as an overstatement of their grasp on the territory they supposedly control.

Losing 36,000 pounds of wheat and so much oil is bad enough, but the chance that the Somali pirates could hurt the sailors they take captive is of much graver concern. This isn’t a Disney comedy, or a child’s play set- this is the real world, and people are getting taken captive and possibly terrorized. So, I ask, how do we laugh at the on-screen antics of Johnny Depp if pirates are still running amok over a certain territory of the world? And how illogical does our reverent reminiscences of pirate lore look to us now?

As with most things, maybe Jerry Seinfeld best sums up my recently changed view of buccaneers.