Another political columnist, Jonah Goldberg,
weighs in on how to stop the pirates. "Well," he writes in a column this week, "that was simple. Shoot the pirates, problem solved." Indeed, it was a simple solution to that particular problem.
But, it may not be the end of it. As we saw yesterday, the somali pirates captured four more ships and already hold about 200 hostages.
Still, Goldberg has an interesting point, both about the international laws that end up protecting modern pirates and the broader media culture that seems to embrace them. Writing for the conservative web site townhall.com, Goldberg notes:
Why has this [arresting pirates] become so complicated? I don't mean finding and shooting pirates, which can be quite difficult, according to experts. I mean the issue of piracy, which has been around since the 13th century B.C. And it hasn't gotten any more complex.
Several answers come to mind. For starters, the culture has become more pro-pirate. Although everyone hoped for the safe return of Phillips, it was clear the media and public thought there was something charmingly exotic about all this pirate talk. Avast, mateys, and all that.
Of course, tales of Blackbeard and the like have always fascinated, but in recent years pirates have joined ninjas, mafiosos, drug dealers and even serial killers as pop-culture heroes. If we can make cannibals and psychopaths -- albeit fictional ones -- like Hannibal Lecter and Showtime's "Dexter" into sympathetic figures, it's no wonder we can take a profession historically associated with murder, rape, pillaging and torture and turn it into a Disney franchise.
Then, of course, there's the fact that the pirates today aren't flamboyantly dressed, gold-bling-sporting white guys better suited for "Project Runway," but very poor Muslim Africans from a failed state. Generations of "don't blame the victim" talk have made us sympathetic to criminals, particularly Third World ones.
Indeed, the British, who once hastened human progress by hunting and hanging pirates, are now afraid to allow the Royal Navy to even arrest them for fear that under the 1998 British Human Rights Act, the captured pirates might demand asylum in Britain. After all, you can't send pirates back to their home country, where they might be mistreated.
Goldberg is an editor at large for the conservative political magazine National Review. An archive of his articles can be founder here.
