April 14, 2009
Not All Pirates Carry
Guns
OK, something has been bothering me. Exactly how would a handful of
pirates in a small boat be able to take over a 17,000 ton cargo ship?
I
just read about the daring rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, the
incredibly heroic freighter captain who gave himself up as a hostage to
Somali pirates to keep them from harming his crew. He spent five days in
a lifeboat with his captors, until some snipers on an American warship
gave a pretty convincing demonstration of the basic drawbacks you might
face if you happen to take up a career in pirating.
But what I don’t understand is how the pirates keep getting on board in
the first place. Have you ever been near one of those ships? They’re
huge! It’s not like you can just pull up alongside, knock on the door,
and say, “Good afternoon, sir. Somali pirates here, and we’ve come
around to take you hostage. Mind if we come in?”
Apparently what these guys do is climb ropes up the side of the ship,
slinging their assault rifles behind them and (presumably) clenching
cutlasses between their teeth. So to become a pirate, you apparently
have to have successfully passed the fitness test in Mr. Frick’s 7th
grade gym class. With an AK-47.
But this raises the question of how those ropes got there in the first
place. If freighters are sailing around the seas near Somalia trailing
nice fat ropes, with knots tied at the bottom to make for easy climbing,
then I believe we may have just discovered one way to seriously curtail
Somali piracy.
Of
course, I have a feeling that it may not be quite that simple. Maybe the
pirates come along side and throw grappling hooks over the railing, or
shoot the ropes up there with launchers, just like action movie cat
burglars and Batman.
In
that case, though, it seems like the crew of the freighter would notice
all that hook-throwing and rope shooting, wander over, and as the
incoming pirates pop up, simply bash them on the head with a bottle of
grog, or some other handy bit of nautical equipment. Kind of like a
seafaring game of Whack-A-Mole.
I’m clearly missing something here.
You know, I have pretty much the same question about the pirates who
somehow got aboard the largest financial institutions in the world and
have spent the last few years looting the global economy. How did we not
notice all those guys scaling the side of the J.P. Morgan Building?
Maybe it’s because they wear Armani suits instead of grubby shorts and
dirty tank tops. They show up in limos or executive helicopters, rather
than little boats with big engines. And when they lose a major battle,
they just have to fire a few servants and maybe sell off one of the
mansions in The Hamptons.
I
think a big reason we never paid much attention to the Wall Street
buccaneers is that they don’t carry their weapons in plain view. They
overpower us using things called “derivatives,” which have pretty much
the same destructive power as an assault rifle, but they’re not nearly
as noisy.
Or
maybe we looked the other way because we felt like they were letting us
in on some of the action. Piracy just doesn’t seem to be quite as vile
when it’s returning 12 percent net as part of a mutual fund in your 401K
portfolio.
So
the pirates from Somalia have extorted millions of dollars from the
shipping companies. The ones from Wall Street have pocketed billions
from peoples’ life savings and pension funds. Maybe tens of billions.
Hundreds of billions? Nobody is quite sure.
But one thing you can be sure of is that not many of those Wall Street
pirates are going to wind up like the Somalis who were holding Captain
Phillips, with a bullet between the eyes inscribed “Property of the
United States Navy.”
In
a way, that seems like a pity, doesn’t it?
Copyright ©2009
Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.
Click here to talk to our writers and
editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.
To e-mail feedback
about this column,
click here. If you enjoy this writer's
work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry
it.
