Launching the Jolly Roger

Yesterday morning as I was getting ready to leave for work, I heard little footsteps coming down the stairs, even though this is vacation week. It turned out to be Ian, and he was a Man with a Mission. Somehow, he got up yesterday with the single determination to build a particular crafts project for his brother, Daniel. Particularly, Ian wanted to make Daniel a "Jolly Roger," based on the instructions in a Crafts-for-children book. Normally, we normally think of the Jolly Roger as the pirate flag (there is a theory that "Jolly Roger" is a corruption of the French "Joli Rouge" or "pretty red" - red, in this case, not being a happy color...). But for the boys, Jolly Roger was not a mere flag, but the name of an entire pirate ship, as identified in the book that provided the instructions for building it.

Ian got the inspiration to make a pirate ship for his brother, out of a cardboard box, etc., and got up with the single-minded determination to do precisely that. Although I had to go to work, within a minute or so, Ian had me recruited to find a cardboard box - ideally a big box - so I was off to the garage and cellar, etc., emptying out boxes of less-important things to make way for the new seafaring vessel. Although Ian had intended this as a surprise for Daniel, within a minute or so of Daniel coming downstairs, he was right in thick of the action.

By the end of the day, the ship was full of both pirates and soldiers - of the green, plastic, World War II vintage... Ian told me that this was the fallout of a battle between the pirates and the soldiers, or "army-guys," in Daniel's parlance, and that, on this occasion, the pirates were the good-guys and the soldiers were the bad-guys. Of course, I wanted to know more about this classification. Ian explained that the pirates were good and the soldiers were bad because this was Daniel's world.

This morning, I followed up with Daniel, who confirmed that the pirates were the good-guys and the army-guys were the bad-guys. I asked him why, and he seemed to be saying he thought it would be more interesting that way. But of course, Daniel's sympathies are naturally going to be with the pirates in any case.

Twenty years ago, I might have been concerned, but after NATO's misadventures in Serbia, the Middle East and Afghanistan, I'm inclined to think of the pirates as the more benign agency.

Of course, Daniel has no such antipathy for militarism; rather than being the lesser of two evils, I'm quite sure he regards the pirates as simply being the cooler of the two.

(February 29, 2012)