ps: chimp attacks are so in right now. LOL

Mom: Choose something else. I don’t want you to read about pirates.

Kid: Why?

Mom: Because there’s too much fighting and stealing in those pirate books.

Kid: But that’s what pirates DO!

To the mom’s credit, she was persuaded by her son’s logic and let him get the pirate book.

Pirates on the poop deck sure beats the so called heros of this business who talk about poop and pissing in their books and in their book presentations. It caters to the lowest common denominator as egos go more out of control and hunger for power grows.

Facebook is a being datamined for all your info, any progressive would be wise to get off it and leave that world of sycophants behind.

(I do recommend the Isaiah Berlin though, as background reading. Today is a big day for Pagans versus Christians, after all!)

The pirates aren’t not killing their hostages out of chivalry. Dead hostages mean there’s nothing to prevent military action against them. The guys are trying to walk the line of stealing as much as they can while not provoking anyone to bring down the hammer. They’re not sticking it to the Man. In this case, they were doing it by commandeering a ship that was transporting relief supplies to Somalia, Uganda, and Kenya. They’re desperate men, in a desperate situation, doing desperate (and, yes, criminal) things. To construct a political message against unjust authority and hypocrisy out of that is wish fulfillment, no matter how bad most American movies are.

I do not doubt the bravery of all concerned, and I’m glad the American captain is safe. But this insulting posture regarding these Somali pirates is just hypocritical. I thought Americans celebrated outrageous bravery in pursuit of the big score! Watch our movies! Watch our TV shows! These Somali pirates apparently have been trying not to kill their hostages, over the past couple of years of piracy, and they have made off with hundreds of millions of dollars in ransoms. Are you telling me that none of them have encountered American dramatic scripts ENCOURAGING this kind of behavior?? Americans LOVE this sort of criminality!

My friends will undoubtedly be happily reading children’s books to their kids tonight that celebrate rebelliousness and rule-breaking and derring-do (Robin Hood anyone?) in the face of unjust authority. (How about the people in one of the poorest countries on earth brazenly stealing money from people in the richest country on earth? Sounds like the plot of a popular book to me.)

Robert Louis Stevenson was definitely right on the cutting edge, yes. He was a Scot — and the British were the bosses of Scotland. Such a man surely was anti-authoritarian.

I love to remind customers that this man wrote “A Child’s Garden Of Verses” AS WELL AS “Doctor Jekyll And Mr. Hyde” AS WELL AS “Treasure Island” AS WELL AS “Kidnapped.” The guy had astonishing range (he was Jorge Luis Borges’s favorite writer)

In contemporary American media culture, if it bleeds it leads. We want stories about ANYONE dying in a big fancy way. We want deadly drama. We are collectively fixated on death as morbidly negative and bad.

But Stevenson could write about John Silver the way he did because there’s no morbid fixation there. Bravery might entail death. If you’re out there on the sea, without any master to answer to — you were daring, and that’s one of those old-time Pagan Virtues. The Roman way of thinking. (Isaiah Berlin talks about the Pagan Virtues brilliantly in “The Crooked Timber of Humanity.” Caesar and Machiavelli were on the same page here.)

Silver was out there, on the edge, and Stevenson approved simply because the character Silver didn’t require approval of anyone (least of all his own creator).

Here’s Stevenson’s famous poem about death — a stanza of this was put on his gravestone (in Samoa — he was 49 when he died there of TB):

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

I think the pirate is an iconic figure in children’s literature because he cannot be gotten rid of.