Pirates Beware

Why isn’t there a bully nation declaring war against pirates? Not against pirating software, music and movies, but real, live pirates on the sea, kidnapping other seafarers and holding their loot for ransom. Since we’ve lost more US troops in the Iraq War than we lost citizens on 9/11, and the wounded number well into the tens of thousands, with no sign of letting up, I think it’s time to fight another war; one with a little more credibility and hope of accomplishing something good.

A War on Pirates would be something I could get behind, because if there are people out there making it unsafe to drive boats on open water, then I want them taken care of. And if they’re hijacking tankers and making people afraid to pass through the Suez Canal and through Pirate Alley, someone should do something about that. They shouldn’t have their own alley! An alley of pirating! Shouldn’t we be invading this Pirate Alley and taking it over! A War on Pirates needs to be fought. It sounds way more interesting than a War on Terror or a War on Drugs. If we’re going to declare war on things instead of countries, we might as well declare a War on Pirates.

We could have Department of Waterland Security Pirate Threat Level, which, of course, would be high, so we’d call it Purple Alert, and that would be announced every three seconds at every conceivable and inconceivable port we own – and some we don’t. Every marina, every waterway, and every puddle of water bigger than a blow-up swimming pool would be crawling with Waterland Security, harassing every single boater and swimmer who happens to get wet. We’d have to get special identification to travel by water, and passports for every place we fish, and holding indefinitely in our Grenada Bay Prison anyone wearing medallions, having dreadlocks, multiple ear-piercings, peg legs, hand hooks, eye patches, rum breath, or wearing pantaloons with a puffy shirt. We could sell pirate preparedness kits and limit how much oil, gold doubloons, and other cargo you could put on your boat/ship. We could name Johnny Depp as the FBI’s most wanted list because he IS the most wanted by the most people! He’d make YouTube videos decrying his innocence and declaring war back on us, saying we deserve it for whatever reason he chose, looking sickly and pathetic, mocking us further because we can’t catch this pathetic-looking guy in the middle of an ocean. The war itself would be fought by our military, but we’d privatize as much of the security and reconstruction as possible, giving all the contracts to the companies owned by people who run our country, making them richer and making the war unfavorable for them to end. We’d turn a blind eye to the conflict of interest because fighting pirates would be paramount to greedy fucking bastards, and anyone who criticized the way the war was fought would be considered a pirate, too. Of course, we’d tap phones and make up un-Constitutional laws allowing the government to track its own citizens to aid in capturing pirates among us. Pirates among us would create derision within the country and lead, somehow, to us demanding stricter laws about immigration and turning Canadians into our domestic enemies. This would lead to the deportation of many Canadians and rampant anti-Canadian sentiment in the US, even though there are no Canadian pirates. It would be discussed hotly by politicians during election years, trying to deflect the attention off an unwinable War on Pirates, which, seven years later, would still be fought on multiple fronts, with countless casualties, no end in sight, and their own profits from the war going so far beyond obscene that it becomes inconceivable.

Whew. Okay, maybe we shouldn’t go about it this way. Maybe we would be smarter. Because pirates are wily and clever! Disney would not stand for us to vilify one of their biggest breadwinners anyway. (Don’t get me started about the parallels there.) No, we’d have to do it right this time.

But a War on Pirates would be good. I think. Because wars are good, right? They fix things? They make bad things stop and bad people go away, right?