Some fashions, like the Hula Hoop or the strap-on Man-gina (TM), are but mayflies, lighting up our humdrum lives for the merest season and then—poof!—disappearing in a cloud of fizzy space dust.
But other memes—like ball-gags, crystal meth and homemade kung-fu throwing stars—worm their way so deeply into our lives that we soon wonder how we ever got on without them. The current pirate craze is almost certainly among the latter.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "What pirate craze?" God, you're depressing. Take a look around. See all the thin chicks with cabin-boy haircuts and ultrafashionable three-quarter-mast deck pants? They're just the tip of an iceberg—an iceberg of rusty-cutlass-waving, bilge-rat-milk-drinking, water-logged-corpse-mutilating, punk-pirate anarchy the likes of which hasn't been seen in America since Blackbeard.
For the unhip among us, this inevitable descent into a culture of violent, unwashed, rum-fuelled primitive-communism and nautical criminality (interspersed with brutal but usually consensual man-on-man sex and the occasional traumatic amputation) will commence with the June 7 release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, in which Johnny Depp once again swans 'round late-18th-century Hispaniola impersonating the Rolling Stones.
But for America's hard-core pirate cognoscenti, POtC 2 will be but a catalyst—the first pebble in an avalanche of pirate pop-phenom that will sweep away every last vestige of bourgeois morality and once again make America the land of the free. Like in Deadwood. Only with pirates.
You need proof? The stick-thin fashionistas who patrol our culture's borders like anorexic Minutemen jumped on the buccaneer bandwagon, like, months ago. "The skull and crossbones flies again in the upcoming fashion season. The skull reminds us both of our impermanence on Earth, and of the romantic transience of fashion trends. Should we be spending our hard-earned golden doubloons on the next must-have fashion items, or are there more important things in life?" gibbered the featherbrained sleekmag.
"Fashionistas are trading runways for planks," grunted the somewhat less sophisticated trendcentral.com.
Yeah, okay, so Johnny Depp is producing a pirate-song cover-version album featuring the comedy dwarf rocker Bono. But did you know that there's already a massive underground real pirate music scene out there? Featuring the likes of Captain Bogg & Salty, Pirate Jenny, Hucklescary Finn, Brine & Bastards, Pirates R Us and Rusty Cutlass?
And that there's a thriving pirate-punk scene featuring bands called Poxy, The Dirty Mugz, Thee Pirates, Flogging Molly and (amazingly) I'm the Pirate-He's the Ninja?
And that September 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day? Jesus, where have you been?
In other words, American society has been so thoroughly infiltrated by this sinister, swashbuckling fifth column that an all-out pirate revolution is all but an historical inevitability. For sure, it starts innocently enough with Old Navy three-quarter-length trousers. But then come the peg-legs, the eye patches, the parrots, the scurvy, the flesh-rotting tropical diseases and the 'baccy-chewing pet monkeys in cute little stripey trousers and tricorner hats.
And before you can say "Yo ho ho," we'll all be living in tropical communes from which we'll sally forth to rob and kill the rich. After which we'll immediately spunk all our ill-gotten booty on booze, opium and flamboyant silk cummerbunds for our favorite man-whores.
So a pirate-run America is all but a certainty—unless the top-secret Council of Ninjas can st ...
(Editor's note: The author was found dead at his computer, a homemade kung-fu throwing star jutting from his throat).