I asked Ms. Cornell, a Trinity senior and public policy major, to a lunch interview at the Armadillo Grill so we could talk about pirates, but I hardly expected her to come dressed as one. Now she's finding it difficult to manipulate a tortilla with a hook where her right hand should be. She gives up and pushes her tray aside.
"Look around," says Ms. Cornell, raising her eyepatch. "Do you see all the stares I'm getting?"
I scan the Dillo. Employees are busy slicing beef behind the counter; on the couches, students are eating nachos and watching ESPN.
Everybody's going about their business--not a single odd glance in the direction of what appears to be a fully-dressed pirate.
"Exactly," she says. "Two or three years ago, it would've been impossible to go out in public with this authentic 18th-century replica captain's hat, let alone with this stuffed parrot on my shoulder. But now--it's completely acceptable. It's just a very exciting time to be a pirate."
Very exciting indeed. Ms. Cornell is at the forefront of a trend that is sweeping Duke and much of the rest of the nation--everywhere, people are dressing like, talking like, and otherwise impersonating pirates.
In 2002, journalist Dave Barry popularized National Talk Like a Pirate Day, turning "yarr!" and "shiver me timbers!" into catchphrases throughout America's dorm rooms and officeplaces.
And just this past summer, Disney's flick "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" was the surprise box-office hit, taking third place with a $274.4 million gross. What could be behind this surge in piracy?
"For as long as they have been able to pose such questions, human beings have searched for a source of fundamental meaning," says Rev. Dr. Alan Piersall, a professor at Duke's respected Divinity School. "And it's an unfortunate fact that organized religion has been waning in popularity for years now, at a time when political cynicism has reached a high point. America's young people needed something to fill that void in their lives. Granted, it's a bit odd that they should have settled on pirates, but hey, you know?"
These days, estimates Ms. Cornell, Duke's burgeoning pirate community makes up nearly one-third of the student body. Beginning as members of a small, persecuted sect in the early 1990s, Duke's pirates quickly gained clout and influence, attracting influential converts and increasingly finding it safe to proclaim their piracy in public.
For Ms. Cornell, the appeal to students is obvious: "Pirates operate outside of the law, they work by their own rules," she says. "But at the same time they often have the tacit complicity of powerful people, just like Sir Francis Drake."
But many in academia have been delving for deeper explanations. Dr. James Barbarossa is a leading neo-piratologist at Seton Hall University. "We've found that the symbols commonly associated with piracy have a deep resonance in the modern psyche, in a very Jungian sense," he says.
According to Dr. Barbarossa, symbols like the peg-leg and the eyepatch connote aggressive confidence and a sense of general well-being. In one study, high-school seniors forced to take the SAT with stuffed parrots attached to their shoulders scored an average of 40 points higher than a non-parrot control group.
"And in a follow-up study," the professor continues, "we tracked the subjects at their senior prom. We found that the dates of the parrot group were 67 percent more likely to end in sexual intercourse."
The source of such confidence is no mystery to Ms. Cornell or the other Duke pirates. "I think it's inspiring that far from caring what other people think, pirates actively try to be as slovenly and offensive as possible," she says, noting that pirates rarely feel the need to eat vegetables, do laundry or shower. "It's refreshing. I think Duke would be a more carefree place if we all just went for 'effortless piracy.'"
Indeed, Duke's pirates see their movement as more than a passing fad; to them, piracy is a revolutionary way of thinking that could change collge life permanently. Ultimately, says Ms. Cornell, "pirates remind us that there are more important things than grades, jobs, or looking put-together--like rum, wenches and booty."
In the meantime, the pirate sitting across the table from me has figured out how to cope with her burrito: holding it down with her peg-leg, she uses her cutlass to slice it into bite-sized pieces and then spears them on her prosthetic hook.
Is it perhaps a metaphor, I ask her--a symbol of pirates and the modern world living together not in antagonism, but in harmony?
"Yarr," she replies.
Robert Goodman is a Trinity junior. His column usually appears every third Thursday.
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