The Washington Post tries to cancel pirates as Tampa Bay Buccaneers set to appear in Super Bowl

The article comes with the context of Sunday's Super Bowl, wrapping up the latest season of American professional football. This year, the Kansas City Chiefs, who have similarly ridiculous controversy over their team name, will face off against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, named for the pirates who frequented the coast of Florida during the colonial era.

"Yet, while this celebration of piracy seems like innocent fun and pride in a local culture, there is danger in romanticizing ruthless cutthroats who created a crisis in world trade when they captured and plundered thousands of ships on Atlantic trade routes between the Americas, Africa and Great Britain," wrote Jamie Goodall, a "staff historian at the US Army Center of Military History."

"Why? Because it takes these murderous thieves who did terrible things — like locking women and children in a burning church — and makes them a symbol of freedom and adventure, erasing their wicked deeds from historical memory."

Of course, it makes intuitive sense to the folks at the Washington Post that we must not sanitize the memory of people who have been dead for 200 years or more. After all, if we don't make sure to demonize these pirates, our limitlessly impressionable youth may take up the practice themselves, mimicking the story of South Park's Eric Cartman, who's romanticized vision of piracy influences him to lead a contingent of schoolchildren to Somalia.

The author also makes sure to note that these buccaneers "willingly participated in murder, torture and the brutal enslavement of Africans and Indigenous peoples," as if the fact that pirates from everywhere, throughout history, enslaved and murdered their captives was not common knowledge already. The classic cartoonish image of a captive "walking the plank" into an encirclement of hungry sharks is a scene which has been broadcasted to virtually every child in the western world at this point.

While many may find some fun in roleplaying such a scene, it goes without saying that virtually everyone apart from psychopaths and, apparently, Washington Post writers see the pirates as being the obvious bad guys. While the former might have a worrying sense of admiration for the gruesome pirates, the latter believes that the rest of the population is simply too stupid to recognize pirates as bad. Thank God that we have such enlightened writers to inform us, the human skull on the Buccaneers' logo just didn't do a good enough job of getting the message across.

"So why do we celebrate individuals who were the baddest of bad guys?" Goodall asks. "Should we celebrate their complicated legacy?"

The answer is that we do not celebrate their legacy. It is common for sports teams to choose playfully threatening names. For example, Tampa's counterpart in Minnesota takes the name of the Vikings, who were similarly brutal plunderers who sailed the seas of northern Europe. It is likely that millions of Americans descend from the people of northern Europe and the British isles who were terrorized by the Vikings for hundreds of years, but since 1000 years have gone by, the team name merely bares cartoonish imagery of a once powerful and intimidating bunch.

The same goes for pirates. While there are still pirates today, they are few and far between and plague only a handful of dysfunctional countries such as Somalia. The name carries a message with it: don't mess with us. If people did not know the ruthless and intimidating nature of historical buccaneers, it is unlikely that the name would have been used at all.

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