{"id":112448,"date":"2017-07-18T13:30:46","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T17:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=112448"},"modified":"2017-07-18T14:19:46","modified_gmt":"2017-07-18T18:19:46","slug":"it-was-a-year-of-pirates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/18\/it-was-a-year-of-pirates\/","title":{"rendered":"It Was a Year of Pirates"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

We\u2019re going down!<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

A couple of weeks ago, before the president attacked the show on Twitter, I was asked to appear on\u00a0Morning Joe<\/em>. This surprised me. I was under the impression that Morning Joe<\/em> was a political program.\u00a0It seemed to me the producers had\u00a0made a mistake. Maybe they’d mixed us up with the New York Review<\/em>? With the London Review<\/em>? Or, could it be … the Partisan Review<\/em>?\u00a0After\u00a0I found the studio in Rockefeller Center\u00a0and was deposited in the empty\u00a0green room, my anxiety continued to mount. Howard Dean bounded in, looking for a piece of fruit among the battered doughnut\u00a0boxes, and\u00a0bounded out.\u00a0In the corridor outside, I heard producers discussing the Senate health bill. As I was led onto the set, the previous guest, Al Franken, gave me a vague, encouraging pat. I must have looked as nervous as I felt. Not just nervous\u2014disoriented, as if I\u2019d wandered into somebody else\u2019s dream.<\/p>\n

The hosts\u00a0nodded hello,\u00a0then, just before the commercial ended and we went on air, Joe Scarborough mentioned a poem, one we\u2019d published in the Review<\/em>. \u201cYou know when you read something that makes you want to drop what you\u2019re doing and run upstairs and find a highlighter?\u201d he asked the others. \u201cThat\u2019s how I felt when I read that poem that begins with the pirates.\u201d So the penny dropped. I had been invited as the editor who\u2019d published \u201cHistorically Speaking<\/a>,\u201d by Stephen Dunn, the same poem that haunted me all through the election\u2014and the opening piece in our Winter issue<\/a>. It was a better reason than any I could have dreamt up.<\/p>\n

\n

It was a year of pirates in speedboats,
\nanonymous bullies spreading privacies
\non the Internet, and the worst of them
\ndoing worse than that and wishing to be known
\nfor what they\u2019d done, their perfidy
\nan advertisement for a cause \u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Subscribe<\/a> now to read the whole poem\u2014and everything else we\u2019ve published\u00a0over sixty-four years of grappling with\u00a0piracy, anonymous bullies, and other\u00a0current events.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had been invited to Morning Joe as the editor who\u2019d published \u201cHistorically Speaking,\u201d the same poem that haunted me all through the election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1188],"tags":[16304,8919,19907,29555,29552,9314,29551,29527,8307,3539,165,24218,2426,29556,10203,29554,54,29553],"class_list":["post-112448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-archive","tag-archive","tag-election","tag-from-the-archive","tag-health-care","tag-historically-speaking","tag-howard-dean","tag-joe-scarborough","tag-morning-joe","tag-pirates","tag-poem","tag-poetry","tag-political","tag-politics","tag-senate-health-bill","tag-stephen-dunn","tag-talk-show","tag-television","tag-year-of-pirates"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIt Was a Year of Pirates: Read Joe 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