"Propelled through all this madness, by your beauty and my sadness
I'll never change or rearrange, till I've finished what I've started
...
I'm ugly and you know it, but you think that I'm a poet
So I'll keep the rhyme if I feel in time, it gets me where I'm going"
-----Flogging Molly, "Selfish Man" from Swagger

Swagger is the essense of the pirate life. To be a pirate, one must do terrible things, you must steal and kill, without becoming a total bastard. Why? Because if you're a bastard it is only a matter of time before one of yer mates slits yer throat and tosses ye overboard. To do these things, you must have supreme confidence in yourself. You must take what you want not because you're too lazy to work for it, but because you boldly claim it as your own. You must become a lion. You must possess that certain swagger. Also, you must have read Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island as an impressionable lad, decided that Long John Silver was a cur and a wretch, and resolved that you will grow up to be a better breed of pirate, not a common thief, but an idealistic hero of young boys' fantasies, a man larger than life. The modern pirate takes as his hero Theodore Roosevelt, because he is still idealistic enough to be impressionable and he is eagerly watching TR: An American Lion.