The Curse of the Black Pearl

Upon reading “Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace, I decided to look up the “sit-down restaurant called the Black Pearl on Harbor Park’s northwest wharf” (665). Unfortunately, either my googling skills are severely sub-par, David Foster Wallace made up this restaurant, or it was renamed sometime since 2003 to simply “The Pearl.” This was quite a disappointment for me, a die-hard Pirates of the Caribbean fan, because I was hoping for a restaurant based entirely on Captain Jack Sparrow’s beautiful and legendary ship, the Black Pearl. I have sold my soul to this franchise. Extra books, posters, themed amusement park rides, following the #potc tag on tumblr, the works. If I were to ever get a tattoo, long after my mother has passed away to prevent her from murdering me, it would most likely be matching one of the pirates. I’m disinclined to acquiesce to the end of the fifth film (Barbossa has always been my favorite) and demand a sixth no matter what decline in quality it may bring. Of course, having a trigger word like “Black Pearl” in the second paragraph of this piece made it a bit difficult to concentrate on David Foster Wallace’s writing.

However, the celebration of the torture of lobsters bouncing around in my head among pirates made me realize my vegetarian disgust towards the cruelty of the MLF revealed by David Foster Wallace is a bit hypocritical, given my love of those Caribbean crooks. Through his satire, David Foster Wallace criticizes not only the way Americans torture weaker beings (lobsters), but also how that torture is euphemized and even celebrated (“Light-houses, Laughter, and Lobster” at the “World’s Largest Lobster Cooker”). It’s easy for me to think, hey yeah that’s pretty messed up. But so is idolizing pirates, who are, by definition, not good people. And I know I’m not the only one that thinks pirates are cool. Ask any smart 5^th grader and they’ll tell you pirates are cooler than cowboys, ninjas, aliens, and robots. So it’s not even just killing animals that we celebrate. We probably celebrate a lot of things not worth celebrating without even being aware of how not-worth-celebrating they really are.