Every now and again, someone says something that makes you blink, at which point you say, “You know, I never really thought about that before in that way.”
Eugene Volokh has just such an interesting commentary on pirates.
What is it with all the streets, teams, and such that are named after pirates? There’s a Buccaneer in L.A. (in a set of nautical-named streets by the beach); there are of course the Tampa Bay Buccanneers, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and so on. No-one would want to say “I live on Rapist Road, right by Murderer Boulevard,” but somehow the pirates — who were robbers, murderers, and rapists — are cool. I think I know what’s going on: Enough time has passed that people have set aside the reality of piracy, and substituted for it some romantic glow. But that this glorification of criminals happens doesn’t make it right.
So in the year 2303, will we have “The Toledo Terrorists” and “The LA Al-Quaeda”?
Oddness.
I wonder if the pirates of the past would have ended up with such a burnished image if television, computers, and the like had existed back in their time. Now that we can see what thugs really look like — just think of whatsisname over in Afghanistan, the guy with the eyepatch; “romantic” is not the term his ugly mug brings to mind — the possibility exists that the brigands and killers of today have little chance of getting good press from the descendants of their victims. One hopes.
Real people — whether heroes or villains — rarely measure up to the heroic ideal of what you want them to look like. We all tend to be a bit frumpy, even movie stars when caught unawares.