On the way home this past weekend, I stopped for dinner in Clear Lake. The question of where to eat answered itself, as Clear Lake is home to one of those theme McDonald’s — much like the museum of bad photography on Welch. When I entered the restaurant, the maritime motif immediately set the tone for cheeseburger-eating fun. Perhaps it was the figurehead of a bonneted woman in a yellow dress or the fake rigging separating the booths, but something set my thoughts adrift upon the Seven Seas.

The sea is practically in my blood. My dad was in the Navy. My great grandfather decided at 14 he didn’t like his mother and stowed away on a boat from Madeira to Nova Scotia. In his late teens, another great grandpa worked from ship to ship to circumnavigate the globe. Being 19 myself, I compared it to my own daring adventures with perilous partial derivatives and the fearsome residents of Ames. I realized that my grandfather may have me beat.

In an attempt to spice life up a little, I resolved to become a pirate. What could be better than riding around the ocean with a boat load of Jimmy Buffets? With a cutlass, eye patch and wise-ass parrot, I could be the envy of Norfolk or Kingston, and I would be guaranteed to impress dates paying for dinner with pieces of eight.

The legitimacy of my plan took a serious blow when I realized there just aren’t pirates around like there used to be. This struck me as being odd, as highjacking an Exxon tanker or ship full of Toyotas has to be nearly as profitable as a Spanish gold galleon. My curiosity about the fate of pirates led me to the encyclopedia, where I found that there is a lot more to pirates than buried treasure, tearing pages out of the Bible and harassing Swiss families in Disney movies.

Perhaps the most interesting lot of seafaring knaves were the corsairs from the Barbary Coast. The Barbary Coast was the name used for the independent Muslim states of Morocco, Algeria, Tripoli and Tunisia from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. These states were known hangouts for the corsairs who made their living disrupting European commerce in the Mediterranean and Atlantic as far north as the British Channel and Iceland.

Like their European counterparts, the United States began paying the leaders of Barbary states for protection in 1784. In 1801, the pasha of Tripoli decided to demand more money for his services. This did not appeal to Thomas Jefferson’s sense of humor. Jefferson found it even less funny that American ships were being attacked for the refused pay increase. In 1803, Jefferson decided to try a joke of his own by sending the Navy to blockade the port of Tripoli. In 1805, the U.S. won the Tripolitan War and had a similar victory against Algeria in 1815. The French occupation of Algiers in 1830 ended the 300-year reign of the corsairs.

While the corsairs caused a lot of trouble, they did everyone the service of preserving a balance of power on the high seas. Neither Spain nor Britain could completely rule the waves while the corsairs kept them honest. It is more than coincidence that the end of the corsairs coincided with the beginnings of imperialism and manifest destiny. The decline of the corsairs was quickly followed by U.S. and British naval dominance. I would bet that the absence of pirates led in part to the development of world super powers.

It is important to remember that we were once in the same boat as many developing nations are today. We forget that America was once a scrappy little nation that had to earn every ounce of respect it got from the rest of the world. To defeat Tripoli in 1805, William Eaton and 500 men marched across the desert from Alexandria to capture the town of Derna. Our history is full of daring and unlikely victories like this one against seemingly unbeatable foes.

In 1492, Christians finally ran the last Muslims out of Spain. With nowhere to go, the Muslims relocated to Northern Africa and founded the Barbary states and began tormenting the ships of Christian nations focusing, to no one’s surprise, on Spain. Granted, the Muslims were uninvited dinner guests that stayed for over seven hundred years, but they were probably better off living in Spain than stealing ships of Spanish gold. This is a good reminder that any third world country the U.S. messes with or pisses on today will eventually come back to haunt us.

It seems that U.S. foreign policy of the twentieth century has excelled at leaving loose ends that have either come back to haunt us, like Congress’ failure to pass Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, or are waiting to cause us grief in the future. The U.S. is notorious for funding governments, then deciding they don’t like the government and funding another government or rebels to fight them. I would equate this with paying off your MasterCard bill with Discover. It seems to work for a while, but it will eventually blow up in your face. Perhaps if pirates still posed a formidable threat, our time would be so occupied fighting something inarguably bad, we would have less time to create problems for ourselves.

This is my motivation for preserving the balance of power here at ISU. I’m going to quit shaving today, get a few gold teeth and start piracy anew here in Ames. If you see a guy in a rowboat on Lake Laverne with a bandanna, scimitar, math book and bottle of rum next week, it is I, the Dread Pirate Hoversten, terrorizing sea-going commerce between classes. I’ll have the regents in the palm of my hand, and Jischke will be forced to think twice about every decision he makes from now on, benefiting faculty, students and employees across the land.

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Erik Hoversten is a junior in math from Eagan, Minn.