The week of August 2, 2021
You know, now that I’m off any kind of social media (as much as you can be, these days, because sometimes Facebook is the only game in town. That, or becoming a complete shut-in. (Although the latter option is looking increasingly likely, regardless of your personal tolerance for social interaction.)), I’m finding myself developing weird phone habits. When you’re out of free chess puzzles and not in the mood for Instapaper articles, what else is there to do with this thing?
Well, apparently, you can open the Wikipedia app and scroll through the On This Day section. Which is how I discovered the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition, in which a Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl and his 7 companions sailed an un-steerable raft for 101 days from South America to Polynesia. “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea”, wrote Samuel Johnson, and having been neither I am of course immediately jealous of them.
That is, until I get to the Anthropology section of the article and find out the “why” of the expedition — to prove Heyerdahl’s pseudoscientific theory that “the original inhabitants of Easter Island (and the rest of Polynesia) were the ‘Tiki people’, a race of ‘white bearded men’ who supposedly originally sailed from Peru”, and who were “a sun-worshiping fair-skinned people with blue eyes, fair or red hair, tall statures, and beards”. The wheel spins and lands on racism. The wheel is three quarters racism.