Pirates, vampires, and the question of reality

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on how pirate re-enactors are responding to the Somali pirate attacks. Mark Summers, co-founder of Talk Like a Pirate Day, echoes the appeal made elsewhere for calling the Somali pirates something else:

"There ought to be a different word for pirates in their current incarnation," says Mr. Summers. ... In an aggrieved posting on his MySpace page just after Navy Seals rescued an American captain held hostage by pirates, Mr. Summers suggested some alternative nomenclature: sea-thugs, boat-muggers, kelp-festooned kidnappers. "I got a huge response," he said, "from people saying 'amen.' Or 'aaaar-men.' "

These are confusing times for pirate enthusiasts, grown men and women who like nothing better than dressing up in swashbuckler regalia and staging mock mutinies, kidnappings, pistol duels and pillages for street fairs and birthday parties. They often present -- and glamorize -- such famed rogues as Capt. Kidd and Blackbeard.

Somali teenagers in speedboats, brandishing AK-47s, don't have the same mystique. "Most of us don't consider what's going on there true piracy. They sound more like terrorists. Or thugs," complained Christine Markel Lampe, who edits No Quarter Given, a pirate re-enactor newsletter.

Well, the pirates so fondly romanticized by these re-enactors sound a lot like thugs (we'll leave terrorists out of it) too:

That Golden Age began with the flourishing of buccaneers, who were often authorized by rival European governments to attack Spanish vessels carting treasure to and from the New World. Around 1710, a new breed of cutthroats appeared who had no allegiances except to their own greed. Flying the skull-and-crossbones flag, they plundered thousands of ships, throwing trans-Atlantic trade into crisis. They also practiced torture. "They could come up with some pretty gruesome things to do with people they didn't like," says Marcus Rediker, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh.

The article suggests that while pirate enthusiasts are uncomfortable with recent events, the romanticization of piracy is likely to continue largely unchecked. Writing for North by Northwestern, Matthew Lieb suggests otherwise:

The honeymoon is over. Pirates are no longer cool. In the past few years, swashbucklers have done a complete 180, going from Hollywood heroes who provide Disney with box-office booty to global economic menaces who interrupt trade off the coast of Djibouti ... Piracy, it seems, has finally stormed out of the 18th century, donned an assault rifle and wrested its image from Johnny Depp. The question is no longer “Do we make a fourth movie starring Russell Brandas Jack Sparrow’s brother?” Now, rather, it is a matter of how the world plans to address piracy’s threat to shipping costs and to global economic stability at large.

Actually, the "Do we make a fourth movie?" question is still very much around and widely reported (the answer, in case you haven't heard, appears to be "yes, but without Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom, and director Gore Verbinski") lending some credence to the WSJ's claim that "the alarm has proved unfounded." There's no doubt that plenty of questions have been added to the subject of piracy, but that does not mean the pop culture ones have gone away.

I have considerable difficulty understanding the project of "trying to take something bad [from history] and make it halfway decent," as pirate enthusiast Charles Waldron puts it. This seems to take Peter Leeson's attempt at balanced inquiry into piratical organization to new and troubling level. All judgment aside, however, the WSJ's investigation into this nexus of pirates and popular culture is much appreciated.

Also of note in the article is Rob Ossian's vampire comparison:

"People think of pirates the way they think of vampires" -- they're fun because they're fictional, he says.

"If there really were vampires around, I don't think people would be lining up to buy 'Twilight,' " the best-selling book about a young vampire, Mr. Ossian says. By that reasoning, he expected the hostage crisis to sour the public on piratical fun.

Back in December, we noted this vampire-pirate parallel after reading "How vampires got all touchy-feely" from the BBC News Magazine,an intriguing study into the process by which archetypes that started out as violent, scary, "outsiders" are sanitized and (sorry) defanged.

Replace "vampire" with "pirate" and "1970s" with "mid-19th century" in this passage, for example, and you have one of our central research questions:

So how did the vampire go from being the stuff of nightmares to the object of young girls' dreams - from a figure of evil to a desirable outsider? ...

For Milly Williamson, author of The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the changing cultural depictions of vampires reveals much about human society itself.

There has been a "general shift", she says, from the vampire as exotic foreigner - as depicted in Romantic poetry in the 19th Century and most famously in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula - to the vampire as edgy "outsider".

"From the 1970s, the vampire has achieved a cool, bad boy, exotic and sexy image", she says.

"And he has become a sympathetic creature, someone we feel for."

Of course, pirates are are were real and RPG's and AK-47's would probably beat out bloodlust and fangs, but the pirates (Captain Kidd, Blackbeard) romanticized by the re-enactors on the WSJ article are arguably just as much fictional characters as Dracula or Edward Cullen. The larger question for our project is how a frightening reality, not a blood-curdling fiction, came to be desanitized. The relationship of these glorified representations to a contemporary reality (Somali piracy) take these discursive shifts out of the cloudy realm of literary analysis and into (we hope) relevant IR research. The parallels between vampires and pirates should not be overstated, but we do think they are worth pointing out.