A sea shift in the pirate discourse

The Washington Post has started a discussion board, moderated by Peter Feaver, on how to respond to piracy. The discussion itself is not all that interesting; most of the posts fall along the lines of the discussion summarized my post below (with a few ludicrous proposals that make me understand why Pericles was so worried that the Athenians would go to war with the Peloponnesians "under the influence of anger rather than reason"). What is most interesting is the serious tone of these posts. Whereas the popular discourse surrounding piracy in the fall of 2008 drew heavily upon pirates' iconic status, today's posts center on appropriate military, legal, and diplomatic responses. The historical allusions they make are to Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Wars; not Blackbeard and Captain Hook. Could just be a related to type of people who respond to a Washington Post policy discussion (or Feaver's moderating), but the complete lack of pirate humor suggests that our perceptions of piracy change when there are US lives on the line.

Update: In an interview with VOA, John Patch, associate professor for strategic intelligence at the US Army War College and a retired Navy surface warfare officer and career intelligence officer, agrees with Pericles and me:

"Even with the incident of a US-flagged vessel taken, there's quite a lot of hype involved. World opinion and sometimes US opinion as well is often driven by passion, incidents of the moment and US pride. And we've got to be careful about formulating policy on those kinds of things."