Get Ready For GWOP: The Global War On Pirates

By Brian Unger

Published April 14, 2009 at 1:22 PM EDT

The new pirate poses a terrible and legitimate threat for mariners, and a huge headache for the manufacturers of the top-selling Halloween costume, for Johnny Depp, and for Disney, which is now the world's biggest profiteer and glamorizer of pirates, the new terrorists. Walt is rolling over in his cryogenic grave.

Will librarians be forced to pull copies of Treasure Island from bookshelves? Will fast-food giant Long John Silver's close its doors? Will the Jonas Brothers, a Disney staple whose raucous cover of "Yo, Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)," praising an ocean-going life of robbing and kidnapping, have to end their careers sooner than we expected? One can only hope.

Passe is the villain with a wooden leg who had a vocabulary of one word: Arrrrgh! Anachronistic is the parrot on his shoulder: Caw! Now we Americans must undergo a huge cultural shift as we embark on the modern Global War on Pirates: GWOP.

As a nation, we are all thinking the same thing: The GWOP is going to be long and expensive.

And we're wondering, while still engaged in the Global War on Terrorism, or Overseas Contingency Operation, do we burden the U.S. Navy with a Global War on Pirates, or an On the High Seas Contingency Operation to combat marauding thugs on boats?

We admired the pirate of yore, portrayed by the likes of actor Geoffrey Rush in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, for his independent spirit, allowing no one to govern him, and for living by his own pirate's code.

But the nouvelle pirate is the Glenn Beck of the sea, a maritime libertarian — a "maritiarian" if you will — who is both militant and irritant, less interested in advancing an ideology and more interested in getting rich and getting a cheap thrill.

Let's not give credit to Islamic radicalism, but at least it wants to end Western influence in the Middle East. When it comes to terrorizing the sea, one man's pirate is another man's unemployed Somali bouncer — armed about as well as a 19th century bandit who picked off wagon trains along the Santa Fe Trail, but wearing Keds.

These swashbucklers commandeered a lifeboat within sniping distance of the USS Bainbridge, a guided missile destroyer. Pirates, meet the modern age.

And if you really want to sell your story, someone's got to walk the plank, and you're going to have to add a love story and some romance. You've got to have a hook, or at the very least, a Captain Hook.