What do Somalia, Long John Silver and the U.N. have in common? The answer, unfortunately, is confusion.

Somalia is a regime without a central government. The country would be an Abbott and Costello routine, little more than a vaudeville act in uniforms and machetes, were it not for those machetes. Who's on first? Better: Who's in Mogadishu?

Let's move on to Long John Silver, the character that Robert Louis Stevenson cobbled from "Chronicles Of Pirate Life" by Defoe, and muddled with his own hobbled editor, William Ernest Henley, to form a man by turns brave and cowardly, almost good and at times evil. In other words, Silver is a paradigm for modern moral relativity. He is neither very fine nor very foul. I would say that this character is confused. Put him in the Twentieth Century, sic Sartre on him and he would be, nearly, existential.

Which leaves the U.N.: a quasigovernmental body that says much and means little or means much and says little. (These are the mixed-up minds that not only put Syria on its Security Council, but also appointed Syria as the capo de capo of the Council in the Presidium. Syria, for those who care about such matters, has been linked to assassinations, the development of nuclear weapons and the aiding and abetting of terrorists. It is a country that should be developing pistachio nuts rather than plutonium. The market, I imagine, is so much better for pistachio nuts these days, as just about every country can do plutonium. I mean if the North Koreans can assemble a nuclear warhead, plutonium must be so last month. You have to be really advanced to grow perfectly green little pistachio nuts. But, I digress . . . Just like the U.N.)

Almost every family has a demented aunt or uncle. We invite them over for Thanksgiving dinner and can't wait for them to leave. That's the U.N. It is forever having senior moments and slipping the silverware into its pockets. (See oil for food scandal for example.) It hardly knows whom to condemn and whom to commend. The U.N. has no difficulty condemning and commending the same countries, sometimes in the same week, sometimes on the same day, sometimes in joint resolutions in which the ambassadors don’t agree why they are agreeing to it.

These three befuddled parties are, unfortunately, collectively and cumulatively contributing to piracy along the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Somalia has no functioning government and is run by competing warlords, militias and terrorist groups. It cannot provide basic services to its citizens, who are poor, starving and lacking in any education except robbery and murder, and that they have learned through experience.

So why blame Long John Silver for this African nation's calumny? Long John Silver's confusion of character is our own confusion about his character. He is a pirate, and therefore a romantic character, a swashbuckler, a corsair, mythic by means of movies and literature. Close your eyes and say the word "pirate", and I guaranty that you do not conjure a ragged starving Somali at sea.

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