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demiurgentThe Wall Street Journal has an article on how real life murdering pirates are souring all the fun of dressing up and doing Robert Newton imitations.
I've had fun with "Talk Like A Pirate" day like a lot of people have. It's fun to shout 'Arr, matey' and make references to scuppering on a handspike else and all the rest. But it's always seemed a little weird to me -- almost as weird as the Pirates of the Caribbean movies have been, with their convoluted Pirate code and the weirdass sense that somehow we weren't talking about people who did horrible things because they wanted your shit. I hear about all the good things from pirate culture, like the funds that pirate ships would set up to compensate crewmembers for the injuries they suffered while attacking, sacking, pillaging and sinking ships and murdering their passengers and crew, or how ships were set up as democracies so the crew had the chance to elect the captain who was best at selecting targets to sack, murder and sink. Really, it was all about the sense of freedom, of living life as they chose on the open seas! The whole "killing people and taking their shit" thing? That was no big deal.
A few years back, on one enterprising Talk Like A Pirate day, I elected to do something different. I thought I'd write something close to what a pirate would actually say -- not what Robert Newton would say (the depiction of Pirates in the popular media was established by Walt Disney in the fifties and reinforced by Walt Disney in the last ten years. Real life pirates talked like... well, talked like sailors, often of questionable literacy. No 'Pieces of Eight' or stuff.) It wasn't an angry post and it wasn't a post telling folks to stop shouting 'arr.' It was just another way to talk like a pirate -- e.g., talk like someone who wanted to take your shit and was more than happy to kill you if that's what it would take.
Some folks really liked it -- they saw it, as they said, as being creative or trying to stretch the definition. Others thought I was being... well, a poop. (I think that's when I made my Poop icon.) I also got some e-mail that was... unflattering. I was, so they said, being a downer.
In subsequent years, I either quoted actual songs from the golden age of piracy or just didn't play. Not because I dislike fun, but because I had something of a bad taste in my mouth. It seemed... I don't know, less fun to talk like a pirate when I felt a societal requirement to pretend pirates weren't... well, bad people who did bad things.
And now, suddenly, piracy is getting a bad rap, because honest to God pirates have re-entered the public consciousness (they had always been around, mind -- Somali piracy didn't start in 2008) and the people they were killing or kidnapping had started to be white Americans instead of black Somalis or brown Indonesians. So reading an article written about Mark Summers -- one of the founders of "Talk Like a Pirate Day" -- describing how he's pissed off because real life criminals are making acting like a fake criminal less palatable seems... well, it seems astoundingly insensitive. Saying that there should be different words for 'pirates' and 'piracy' today because you want to mythologize the crime they're committing just seems to miss the point.
There have been a baker's dozen piracy incidents in the last two weeks. Sometimes pirates have been warded off by shipboard anti-piracy measures, Sometimes the pirates have boarded ships, taken what they want and left. Sometimes the pirates have kidnapped crew off the ships. Sometimes they have seized the vessels in toto, to bring to port, repaint and sell. Actual murder is rare these days, but happens.
Look, have fun cosplaying. Honestly. Shout "Arr, Jim-Boy" all you like. I was a Renn Faire actor -- I know how much fun it can be. When the 19th of September rolls around, have a grand old time with it.
But let's have some perspective, shall we? We're talking about killers who take peoples' shit. We're not talking about folk heroes or Keith Richards impersonators or free wheeling anarchists who'd never harm a hair on a pretty girl's head. Pirates aren't like that.
And you know what? They never were.
I've had fun with "Talk Like A Pirate" day like a lot of people have. It's fun to shout 'Arr, matey' and make references to scuppering on a handspike else and all the rest. But it's always seemed a little weird to me -- almost as weird as the Pirates of the Caribbean movies have been, with their convoluted Pirate code and the weirdass sense that somehow we weren't talking about people who did horrible things because they wanted your shit. I hear about all the good things from pirate culture, like the funds that pirate ships would set up to compensate crewmembers for the injuries they suffered while attacking, sacking, pillaging and sinking ships and murdering their passengers and crew, or how ships were set up as democracies so the crew had the chance to elect the captain who was best at selecting targets to sack, murder and sink. Really, it was all about the sense of freedom, of living life as they chose on the open seas! The whole "killing people and taking their shit" thing? That was no big deal.
A few years back, on one enterprising Talk Like A Pirate day, I elected to do something different. I thought I'd write something close to what a pirate would actually say -- not what Robert Newton would say (the depiction of Pirates in the popular media was established by Walt Disney in the fifties and reinforced by Walt Disney in the last ten years. Real life pirates talked like... well, talked like sailors, often of questionable literacy. No 'Pieces of Eight' or stuff.) It wasn't an angry post and it wasn't a post telling folks to stop shouting 'arr.' It was just another way to talk like a pirate -- e.g., talk like someone who wanted to take your shit and was more than happy to kill you if that's what it would take.
Some folks really liked it -- they saw it, as they said, as being creative or trying to stretch the definition. Others thought I was being... well, a poop. (I think that's when I made my Poop icon.) I also got some e-mail that was... unflattering. I was, so they said, being a downer.
In subsequent years, I either quoted actual songs from the golden age of piracy or just didn't play. Not because I dislike fun, but because I had something of a bad taste in my mouth. It seemed... I don't know, less fun to talk like a pirate when I felt a societal requirement to pretend pirates weren't... well, bad people who did bad things.
And now, suddenly, piracy is getting a bad rap, because honest to God pirates have re-entered the public consciousness (they had always been around, mind -- Somali piracy didn't start in 2008) and the people they were killing or kidnapping had started to be white Americans instead of black Somalis or brown Indonesians. So reading an article written about Mark Summers -- one of the founders of "Talk Like a Pirate Day" -- describing how he's pissed off because real life criminals are making acting like a fake criminal less palatable seems... well, it seems astoundingly insensitive. Saying that there should be different words for 'pirates' and 'piracy' today because you want to mythologize the crime they're committing just seems to miss the point.
There have been a baker's dozen piracy incidents in the last two weeks. Sometimes pirates have been warded off by shipboard anti-piracy measures, Sometimes the pirates have boarded ships, taken what they want and left. Sometimes the pirates have kidnapped crew off the ships. Sometimes they have seized the vessels in toto, to bring to port, repaint and sell. Actual murder is rare these days, but happens.
Look, have fun cosplaying. Honestly. Shout "Arr, Jim-Boy" all you like. I was a Renn Faire actor -- I know how much fun it can be. When the 19th of September rolls around, have a grand old time with it.
But let's have some perspective, shall we? We're talking about killers who take peoples' shit. We're not talking about folk heroes or Keith Richards impersonators or free wheeling anarchists who'd never harm a hair on a pretty girl's head. Pirates aren't like that.
And you know what? They never were.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 02:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 04:42 pm (UTC)I can agree that there are dicks and nasty people, and that much of what has happened to Somalia in the past twenty years is squarely on the shoulders of industrialized nations. I don't think anyone 'forced' pirates to seize the Patriot or the Saldanha, and while I think that conditions in Somalia have to be improved and the international community needs to both take responsibility for what has happened their and clamp down on their explicit or complicit part in it, that doesn't excuse kidnapping, intercepting of grain shipments or ransoming cargo, personnel or ships alike.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 11:02 pm (UTC)Which brings me back to my own central point. If part of the reason for piracy is the appalling conditions and horrible treatment of Somali waters, bitching about Somali pirates because it makes cosplaying Captain Kidd less fun seems even more petty. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 03:03 pm (UTC)Er.... +1, I mean.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 03:32 pm (UTC)"Fuck Batman."
Date: 2009-04-27 03:40 pm (UTC)However, you also spent a lot of this post being down on people that enjoy the romantic ideal of pirates. You allowed they should have fun, but you find it morally questionable, even as you admitted you like Renn Faires. I don't get how ignoring the facts of piracy is any different from ignoring the poverty, disease, the abuses of the nobility, the misogyny of women as property, burnings at the stake and all the other problems of the Middle Ages/Renaissance and mythologizing them in Renn Faires.
Your post immediately brought this clip and the title to mind. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFFDdgRj3nE&NR=1) To frame it realistically, Superheroes are fascist vigilantes, who squabble among themselves create insurance claim nightmares, rather than join the Peace Corps.
My point is, you can look at the harsh facts of anything to kill the enjoyment of the mythology of something. It seems terribly inconsistent to be down on pirate lovers and embrace rest.
Re: "Fuck Batman."
Date: 2009-04-27 04:26 pm (UTC)You don't get it because there's no appreciable difference.
If piracy ended in the 15th century, I'd have no moral qualms with the mythologizing of it. It might not be accurate, but hey -- it's fun. By the same token, as much as I've enjoyed Renn Faires in the past (I don't currently attend them, it's worth noting), it always rankled me to see the happy washer wenches and mud beggers and Hollywood style ladies-in-waiting without more than a token nod to the disease, inequity and misogyny. (Not to mention the enclaves of fortune tellers and pro-Wicca witches without Puritans marching in to arrest everyone.) But I can set it aside because England in the 21st Century has plenty of problems of its own, but pouring sewage out the window onto the street as a regular part of the day in every building isn't part of it.
And while I've had some of the fun of Talk Like A Pirate Day diminished because of revisionism, I can full well recognize that's my problem, not a general problem.
But to have people bitching about real life pirates doing bad things to people because it sours Talk Like a Pirate Day just seems crass to me.
Well, no, because Superheroes don't exist and never have existed. The culture of Superheroes is entirely invented. Those real life people who try to ape it -- and they do exist -- aren't fascists, generally, so much as they're deluded. Blackbeard the Pirate did in fact terrorize people. There is a qualitative difference between mythologizing history and actual, full on mythology.
That said, the past thirty years have seen a systemic attempt to 'de-romanticize the superhero,' which have been largely successful. Why then would de-romanticizing pirates -- who really were and are destructive and often murderous criminals -- be more out of bounds than depicting superheroes as misguided or fascistic?
I honestly don't have a problem with people enjoying the myth of pirates. Pirates-as-done-by-Disney are fun. They're fun. There's nothing wrong with fun. But much as an SCA member has to recognize that the real middle ages weren't as fun as Pennsic and a Renn Faire enthusiast has to recognize that the real Elizabethan era was dirty and ugly, pirate enthusiasts have to recognize that pirates weren't just jolly eyepatch wearing theme park characters. And unlike the SCA member, the Renn Faire enthusiast and the Batman fan, pirate fans also have to accept that piracy is still a going concern and that real people are still being hurt as part of that process. It's part of the price of admission.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 03:41 pm (UTC)I really like link to your previous talk like a pirate day entry. It reads like a bit of flash fiction or something. Nice.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 03:53 pm (UTC)A friend put up a locked post about how all the people running around in Victorian costumes, and all the "Gee-Whiz!" 2nd generation SteamPunk miss the point of the 1st gen source material: the British Empire was full of right nasty bastards who would happily enslave and slaughter a population to get what they wanted. That if you weren't "the right sort of person", you weren't really a person, you were less than a machine.
I make an effort not to go raining on their parades, but I don't feel like I should dress up and join in either.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 06:06 pm (UTC)And the people who choose to focus on that equally miss the point that it was also full of brilliance, wonder, progress and opportunity - the dawning of a new age of the world. It was the real world in its day, and like any real world, it encompassed all conceivable extremes.
This is still true today. We in the modern world can either concentrate on the grim portents of climatology, the ever-present prospect of some antibiotic-resistent super-pathogen, the evident disintegration of society in a haze of venality and greed; or we can look at the fact that the lowest echelon of today's working class enjoys a higher standard of living (and can expect to live much longer) than the wealthy aristocracy of the Middle Ages, that we were taught to read and write as children even if we weren't going to become priests...
The big picture is too big to look at the whole thing at once, and if I have to spend all my life sitting in front of it, I'd rather my default viewing angle be the fun parts.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 07:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 08:32 pm (UTC)At the same time, they've latched onto one half of subgenre - the steam angle, and completely missed the other: the punk.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 10:32 pm (UTC)I note that when both cyberpunk (the earlier genre) and that particular vampire revival got into the hands of gamers, the navel-gazing wangst was quickly cast aside in favor of power fantasy with pretenses of telling a "mature" story - superheroes in chrome, fangs and/or fur.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 11:44 pm (UTC)It's happening now to zombies (http://exiledonline.com/zombies-under-attack/) too.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 07:52 pm (UTC)Or maybe people just subconsciously chafe against the strictures of law which unnaturally suppress our vicious, monkeyish natures even as they protect our bodies, our rights, and our higher selves--and they don't care to have this contradiction pointed out to them.
Either way, we need our blackguards and bandits. How much fun would our GTA games be without them?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 08:39 pm (UTC)Isn't that more or less what West Side Story is?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 11:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 08:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 08:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 11:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 08:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 10:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-27 11:26 pm (UTC)"A lucky shot, sir."
ZAT
"Animal."
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-28 12:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-28 01:55 pm (UTC)