The American Freedom Network

Piratrical Irony

We are having our faces spat upon by a rag-tag collection of two-bit thugs who wouldn’t make it out of Detroit alive.  It’s ironic that the USS Bainbridge has to stand helplessly by (under orders from DC, no doubt) while the captive American captain tried unsuccessfully to escape. From the linked story, the following excerpt encapsulates the irony:

“The U.S. was also bolstering its force by dispatching other warships to the scene several hundred miles off the Somali coast, which already was under watch by the destroyer USS Bainbridge—named after William Bainbridge, an American naval officer who fought pirates off the Barbary Coast in the early 19th century.”

Those of you over age 40 may remember, from your American History classes, before they were subverted by the prophets of American self-loathing, stories like the ones about the young midshipmen who sailed to Tripoli in 1804 with Commodore Preble, and who were thereafter known as “Preble’s Boys.”  Their squadron, which included the USS Constitution, was all our infant Navy could send to teach the Dey of Algiers to respect the flag of a people not numerous, not renown in warfare and far removed from the citadels of power in the Old World, except for the commerce carried on under their flag.  Upon entering Tripoli harbor, under the guns of the forts that ringed it, as cannon balls bounced harmlessly off her sides, a nameless Jack gave USS Constitution the nickname that has been her calling card ever since:  Old Ironsides.  After convincing the Dey of the error of his ways, the young officers under Preble’s command went on to brilliant careers in our navy, including the future Captain Bainbridge.

Captain Bainbridge was the second skipper, after Isaac Hull, to command the Constitution in the War of 1812.  He earned a page in the annals of naval warfare for sinking HMS Java in an engagement on the other side of the world.  The Constitution rides at anchor today in Boston Harbor, permanent honorary flagship of the Atlantic Fleet.  You can visit her, walk the walk the decks, and touch the 4 1/2′ oak sides that withstood the Dey’s cannon balls.  (That Bainbridge that is her old skipper’s  namesake is the destroyer now standing by, for want of orders to act, as the Somali banidiit hold one of our merchant captains hostage.)

The fame earned by Preble’s Boys in the War of 1812 inspired an athsmatic Harvard student, and he penned his senior thesis, The Naval War of 1812, is still the standard academic work on the subject.  The athsmatic kid was Theodore Roosevelt, later Undersecretary of the Navy, before ordering, as President, that the Navy land Marines in North Africa, not far from Tripoli, as I wrote in an earlier piece, to free Petticaris, an American taken hostage by a bandit leader named Rasouli.  Heroism inspires heroism, and the example of a small people standing up for themselves was fresh in the memory of that same people when gthey had but newly acquired greatness, as the world measures such things.  Now, as the so-called last superpower, do we remember how we came to be what we once were?  Do we still produce leaders of the caliber of the Presidents who saw the protection of American citizens abroad as part of their sacred duty?  Our current President is ‘monitoring the situation closely.’  That is a euphemism for, ’standing by helplessly.’  I hope that we still deserve better.