You do not *vote* pirates off the seas. You engage them, rake, and scuttle them.

On this Veteran's Day my thoughts are of my wonderful father and his service in the U.S. Navy. He had a story that he loved to tell and I loved to hear of his time in the service. I want to share that story.

Unlike his own father who had served in the Navy during World War 2, my father had the fortune of serving at a relatively peaceful time in our nation's history. Shortly after Naval Boot Camp he was assigned to a destroyer escort where he spent a lot of time peeling potatoes, painting stuff, etc. You get the picture.

The Crossing the Line ceremony has been around as long as their have ships sailing the seas. Essentially it's a ceremony in which seasoned sailors (Shellbacks) initiate those sailors who are crossing the equator for the first time (Polly-wogs.)

The whole thing actually takes a couple of days and is fairly structured. On the evening before the ceremony the Shellback enlisted servicemen "take over" the ship from the officers, who essentially step aside for a couple of days. That evening the Wogs are allowed a sort of mild uprising before they are hazed during the ceremony the next day.

The ceremony itself varies but it usually involves things like beatings, crawling through tubes of rotten garbage, dips in the ocean, kissing the fattest guy on the ship's belly when it's covered in grease, etc. It ends with King Neptune bestowing the title of "Shellback" on the Polly-wogs and a beauty contest involving sailors dressed as women.

On my father's crossing he was part of a particularly large class of Wogs totalling over 60 sailors. They were blessed with a group of Shellbacks who were real son's of bitches. These guys spent the days as the ship approached the equator telling the Wogs in excruciating detail how this Crossing the Line ceremony was going to be the most notorious ever. The beatings were going to be especially brutal and the garbage especially gross.

Dad and his fellow Wogs did what any rational sailors would do under these circumstances: they revolted. On the evening before ceremony they attacked the Shellbacks and locked them up. My dad was part of a group of five guys that took on a radio operator that was a real bear of a man. As dad described the fight their were guys getting thrown around the room as they all tried to hold this giant down.

Eventually they took the ship. They through the giant tube of garbage overboard, elected their own "officers" and partied in their skivvies. As the ship crossed the equator it wasn't under the flag of the United States but instead under a hastily painted Polly-wog flag. My dad was a pirate.

Of course they had to let the Shellbacks out and the hazing took place anyway, under conditions twice as brutal as promised. As my father would tell this story some forty years after it had taken place his eyes would light up at the memory. In his eyes it was worth it.

Upon completion of the ceremony my father was given a certificate that looked exactly like the one below. This certificate hung in his office above his degree in electrical engineering which tells you the importance to which dad held this event. Because while service and duty are important, sometimes we have to be pirates. Even if it's only for a day.

Can't go wrong drowning politicians, Henry.

This piece by Josh Marshall tracks pretty well with how I feel about the changes to politics that've taken place and why it forces moderate Democrats like himself to be partisans.

I live in Manhattan and have a certain perspective on the country. Folks in Oklahoma or evangelicals in South Carolina have a different one. And that's fine. It's their country too. What I think is that a certain political movement has taken over the country -- call it movement conservatism in it's late, degraded form -- and wants to govern it by all or nothing rules.

One of the things I've always cherished about America is that the country was founded on the principle of institutionalized disagreement. The founders recognized that only vibrant debate would bring consensus and built mechanisms into our representative government to govern the rules of that debate while guarding against excesses (balance of powers, veto, etc.) For the most part that system has worked well over the course of the history of this country (the big exception being the civil war.)

Like Josh I recognize that their are a whole heck of a lot of Americans who have different ideas and different perspectives about how things should be run. I'm not always going to get my way and that's okay. The genius of the system is that the protections on speech mean that I have the rest of my lifetime to try and convince those that disagree to come around to my way of things. If I can convince enough people then we can change the laws to reflect our point of view.

For this system to work a vast majority of Americans have to "agree to disagree" and do so within the system. Should there be a signifigant minority unwilling to face the results of government by consensus you could have a violent rebellion of those in the minority. A "war between the states."

But the system has another Achilles' Heel that's become apparent over the course of the last several years: apathy. As fewer and fewer people participate in the system then the old truism to politics that elections are decided by swing voters will die and only the most motivated, who tend to be most extreme in their views, will get to the polls and make determinations on our governance. A political party that recognized this and was unscrupulous enough to take advantage of it might be able to game the system. Once they'd reach that point and since they'd already decided the system of institutionalized disagreement wasn't working to their advantage they'd take steps to further breakdown those sytematic roadblocks to extremism in order to work to permanently consolidate their worldview.

Josh points to the Bush administration as the beginning of the death of the Democratic moderate. I would personally put it back a little bit further. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was the moment when it became clear to me that these people weren't just cute little conservatives that I would disagree with on a few issues and actually dangerous radicals who had no use for our system of governance.

Like Josh I'd like to get back to a point when governmental policy was actually determined by debate on the issues rather than today's political tribalism. It's clear that this will never happen while the radicals are in charge and I'm not so sure about afterwords either. But for our government to work as intended we have to have everybody; left, right and center engaged in the process and willing to play by the rules.