I was watching a promo for the local news the other night and they had a blurb for a story called “Terror in the Tub”. The picture was of a little yellow rubber ducky floating in the tub with a voiceover about the horrors and disease waiting in a child’s bathwater. I wanted to laugh out loud because of the foolishness of making something so innocuous as a kid’s bath seem dangerous.
Also a week or two ago I started a small thread in the General Questions regarding pirate flags. Many of the folks who responded pointed me to sites and literature regarding pirates. Surprise. They were not the handicapped, parrot carrying swashbucklers of myth. They wouldn’t waste time on a “walking the plank” ceremony, because most pirates were uneducated, extremely cruel and ruthless. They’d just flat out kill people in swift, merciless ways.
What I’m getting to is this: What’s this human tendency to take basically harmless things like baths (or diet soda, or aspirin without tamper proof lids etc. etc.), and turn them into horrible dark scary things, while at the same time taking terrible, ugly things, like pirates, and turning them into safe, almost silly images?
I think the major difference between the examples you mention is that pirates aren’t part of Americans’ lives any more, while things like bath water and diet soda are omnipresent. When pirates were actually menacing the seas, their press was less favorable. But now they’re only left in quaint children’s stories, so they have this cartoonish image.
The media are also a factor. They can get a lot of attention reporting threats in new places, like baths. Reporting for the umpteenth time that you should buckle your seat belts isn’t going to sell many copies.
What, you think American media is alarmist? Whatever gave you that idea?
As to pirates, our modern stereotype comes almost completely from a single source: R.L. Stephenson’s Treasure Island. That book was written as a children’s adventure tale, so it was extremely sanitized, and it turned the nautical equivalent of the Crips and Bloods into a rather cartoonish image. To be sure, there is some violence still there, but no more than in any other tales of the time. RLS’s pirates even have a semi-admirable code of honor within their group, or at least some do. Long John is a sympathetic enough character that RLS lets him, alone of all the pirates, escape in the end.
Mentioned above is the idea that pirates are comfortably far off. That is true, but the Nazis aren’t. The Nazi’s of the 30’s and 40’s are still a presence in our social awareness, not to mention the idiots running about today. Yet even they are targets of ridicule. Mel Brooks, Hogan’s Heroes, and The Blues Brothers spring to mind. 300 years from now, will Nazis be goosestepping Keystone Kops villains in children’s stories? I don’t know, but I hope not.
WAG time. It seems to me that man has a need to fear. It’s perhaps something innate that cannot be done away with. However, real evil is too scary sometimes. To deal with that we have to reassure ourselves by laughing at it. But we still have to have something to keep us on our toes, hence ‘Salmonella in Your Kitchen Sponge!’, ‘Do Power Lines Cause Cancer?’, and ‘Baby Bathwater Plague!’ stories pop up. People can afford to fear those things because they know there’s no significant risks there, and those are lso things that they can easily fix. Real evil is harder to take care of than just sticking a sponge in the microwave for a minute.
A lot of it has to do with sensationalism…the media needs to attract viewers and nothing does this like convincing people that danger is just around the corner and the newscasters have a “breaking” story on whatever insidious plague might be approaching.
“Real” evil is us. The horror lurks in our own hearts. We would like to pretend otherwise, of course. It is easier to deal with threats from without, than within.