Here Be Pirates!

 

July 13, 2026: Here Be Pirates!

No, I am not talking about the Pittsburgh Pirate baseball team. Once upon a time I was a huge fan, when I spent a great deal of time with John and Robert Pira, who were rabid Pirate fanatics. It was easy to like the Pirates because of Willie Stargell, arguably the nicest guy in baseball at the time, and the immortal Roberto Clemente, whom I thought was the most exciting player in the game, beyond even Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.

No, I am not talking about the Pirates of the Caribbean, who were my all-time favorite real-life characters when I was growing up. I collected every one of the 66 cards in the Fleer Pirate Bold set and read their tiny biographies, the size of an old tweet, every day. I am still fascinated. My favorite trio is Calico Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. The original Skull and Crossbones motif on a pirate flag is said to have emerged from Calico Jack’s even better design, a skull, representing him, and crossed swords, representing his two female companions and soldiers-in-arms.

I am talking about real pirates on the High Seas today. Specifically, I am talking about the Strait of Hormuz and the United States Navy. More specifically, I am talking about the Navy’s Commander-in-Chief, Donald John Trump. Today Trump announced that our navy will be keeping the Strait open and that he expects passing ships to pay America a 20% surcharge to offset the cost of doing so. This means Trump plans to charge our allies to control, not fix, a problem he created when he declared war on Iran. It sounds like piracy to me. It sounds like extortion.

Maybe I am being unfair. To pirates. What Trump wants to do sounds like a protection racket. Old school: let me smash up your business, and if you don’t want it to happen again, pay me 20% of everything you make so I can protect you against myself. He’s not a pirate, he’s a gangster. He’s not Blackbeard, he’s Al Capone.

July 3, 2026: The Rule Golden

 

I have spent a great deal of time lately thinking about how humans should behave, and about how most human beings, I want to believe, strive to do good or at the very least, do no harm. We acknowledge that we are flawed. After all, perfection would be boring! Throughout history good souls have tried to lay down moral principles by which the rest of us should live. Our own country at its founding endeavored to codify, that is, human rights with a clear understanding that as We The People progressed, we would make the necessary modifications to expand those rights.

Yet it all can be boiled down to this: the Golden Rule distills what human beings ought to be, ought to strive for, in 11 words. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It seems brilliantly simple and probably naive. Georgia Senator and Baptist minister Raphael Warnock says there are versions of this rule in every faith, and that it is key to the small c christian moral code. It means, help others as you would want them to help you in similar circumstances. Do not enslave unless you want to be enslaved. Do not kill unless you want to be killed. Do not impoverish unless you want to be poor. Be kind. It should be self evident. But if it were, we wouldn’t need reminding.

And yet, I know atheists with a better moral code than Mike Johnson and other so-called christians.

Decades ago, Science Fiction writer Damon Knight wrote a novella called The Rule Golden. In it, if you kicked someone, you felt the pain. If you shot someone you died. I don’t know how to remind christians of their own moral code, but reading this book might be a good start, if you can find a copy.