Disney, this is your fault. Sure, the defamation of pirates is heavily compounded by the noodly blasphemers, but it’s your disastrous portrayal of our peg-legged friends that damaged the public’s opinion. No longer do pirates bring about images of looting the weak for personal gain, of someone slowly hacking off their own hand between swigs of rum– not to dull the pain, they just like drinking– so they can have a stalwart looking hook or of a particularly violent flavour of swashbuckling. Pirates no longer strike fear in to the hearts of grown men, their image has been eroded by fanciful portrayals down to little more than fairy tales. To quote Maddox, you can’t spell pirate without irate.
Had this been seen as integral to 2003’s masterpiece of libel the Pirates of the Caribbean, pirates’ situation might not be so bad. If Johnny Depp hadn’t drawn his wimpy audience’s attention to pirates, they may have been able to recover and not be seen under their current semi-mythic light. Depp should have stuck to what he’s good at: Tim Burton films for hyper-dramatic self-proclaimed deep 14-year-old girls. Pirates may be seen as mythical and somehow confined to an era of wooden ships. Despite having seen Depp depict them as such, this is not true.
Pirates still exist, just search Google News and it’s quickly apparent that Somali pirates are keeping up a tradition as old as seafaring itself. It’s certain that they cannot be pleased at their mythical status and– not that there could be any deeper implications here– their recent violence may have something to do with the idolater Pastafarians spreading “Talk like a Pirate Day,” propagating the myth that pirates are somehow syntactically challenged. Pirates are proud of their dialect and reserve their deepest hatred for its abuse and those who can’t hold their rum through a storm. If a true pirate were to catch you abusing pirate speech without the beard to justify it, they would likely tear open your belly like a tauntaun and try and strangle you with your own intestines. Pirates are not nice people.
It’s the removal of rape and visceral violence from the necessary practice of raping and pillaging that makes pirate costumes acceptable for children of otherwise unacceptably low levels of manly. Masquerading as a pirate should be reserved for only those eight-year-old kids capable of growing a beard of sheer will for the sake of their costume. These lucky children should then be expected to proceed to forcefully take candy. Unfortunately, instead of fierce men with missing limbs and fiercer beards, children are presented with Hook from Peter Pan who can barely stand upright (a real pirate can stand upright on a moving boat in a storm while drunk on more alcohol than the last three generations of your family have drunk combined) and is afraid at the sound of a clock. Is this really how misinformed we want future generations to be?