“In Your Times” has a letter from a recent visitor who was appalled at seeing a “pirate flag” (presumably a skull and crossbones Jolly Roger) while visiting Tampa.

“Pirates represent the lowest of the low, theives, rapists and murders. Why honor them with a flag at all.”

Since the writer lists his home as Memphis, TN, I took the comment to be a tongue-in-cheek comment on the recent Confederate Flag kerfluffle.

But, the truth is, I also find the celebration of pirates to be a bit of a head-scratcher. Now, I can understand it in the context of Bucs paraphernalia. It’s not uncommon to name a sports team after something terrifying, which is why the recent NFL expansion team in Houston decided to call itself the Texans, and the new Oklahoma NBA team will call itself Thunder. Thunder terrifies Okies.

But the reality of pirates is that they were bad people. I mean really, really bad people. When I see kids dressed up like pirates for Halloween I imagine their children dressed up like Osama bin Laden a generation from now. In fact, how long before a sports franchise names itself the Terrorists?

Despite one commenter’s assertion that pirates were not murderers, they were. All of the commenters have an idealized image of pirates taken from popular culture. The same commenter suggests that pirates didn’t rape much because there weren’t many women on ships. Erm, you don’t have to be a woman to be raped. He then hits on the canard that pirates were actually a democratic community, voting on laws and leadership.

Now, there is some truth to this. There are examples of pirate democracies, pirate utopias as Hakim Bey called them, but pirates do not exist in only one time, say between 1690 and 1720. Piracy goes back for thousands of years and continues today. Pirate attacks were up in 2002, down the next few years, and up again last year, but the average is about 300 a year. Just a few months ago pirates seized a French yacht off the coast of Somalia.

With this in mind recall Rumsfield’s understanding of ending the GWOT - “The world will know the war on terror is over when terrorism goes the way of piracy and slavery.” Piracy continues to this day, and there are more people enslaved than ever before in the history of humanity (though overall the percentage of people enslaved is the lowest. Do you generate your moral calculus through quantity or percentage?) It seems pretty clear that Rumsfield believed, and I’m sure many in the halls of power still believe, that the GWOT will never end.

I suppose I strayed a little from the original topic, but what really piques my curiosity is why does US culture celebrate so many criminals? Brad Pitt plays Jesse James, thug life rakes in billions of dollars in merchandising sales, we dress our children like pirates for Halloween. What prompts this love affair with criminal behavior?

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