Having just purchased Daniel Sekulich's Terror on the Seas: True Tales of Modern-Day Pirates, now at home on the "contemporary piracy" shelf next to John S. Burnett's Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas (I could mock the the formulaic tendencies of these titles too), it's easy to forget the comically romanticized image of pirates that sparked this project in the first place. However, as Tina Fey's portrayal of a pirate on Sesame Street demonstrates, the defanged image of pirates is alive, well, and teaching Elmo about books:
Nobody's accusing Sesame Street of being out of touch with scary realities (quite the opposite, in fact), but these cuddly Muppet pirates are, to mix nautical metaphors, 20,000 leagues away from the pirates in Sekulich's book. And yet, the possibility and success of both depictions depend, in a sense, on the same popular perception of pirates' "cool factor." This fairly incredible gap between puppets for the preschool crowd and terrorist references for browsers of the military history section of Borders Books points not only to the continued and broad-based popularity of pirates, but also to the sheer absurdity of treating "pirate" as an easily definable term that refers to a static empiric entity.
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