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Megan Carpentier – Guardian

More than 150 years ago, a disparate group of anti-immigrant, conspiracy-minded Americans became sick of traditional politicians and started a grassroots movement to take political power from the hands of those they no longer trusted. When asked by outsiders what their movement was called, they were ordered to answer, “I know nothing,” leading others to call them the Know Nothing party. The movement, however, was co-opted by the traditional parties and undermined by policy disagreements, and many members eventually folded into the Republican party. Some things, apparently, don’t change as much as we’d like to believe.

Republican leaders, and the 20-somethings crafting their made-for-television talking points, are apparently counting on the fact that their base still knows nothing, or is at least willing to forget what they do know. Not content to blame the Bush-led Wall Street bailouts on President Obama, or the shoe-bomber reprise on Obama’s security and intelligence policies that were nonetheless instituted by his predecessors, Republican thought-leaders like Mary Matalin, former White House press secretary Dana Perino and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani have decided that there is one big thing that just couldn’t have happened on the Republicans’ watch: 9/11.

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Haugland, who was the last survivor of the six-man Kon-Tiki crew, had met Heyerdahl in 1944 at a special forces training camp in England, and was selected to join the expedition on the basis of the experience he acquired during the conflict as a radio operator.

In typically nonchalant fashion, Heyerdahl had written to Haugland, whom he thought was bound to be “fed up hanging around at home by now, and would be glad to go for a little trip on a wooden raft”, to invite him on board.

“Am going to cross the Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru,” the invitation ran. “Will you come? Reply at once.” The response was positive”.

The six man crew set off from Callao, Peru, on April 28 1947 and sailed westwards along the Humboldt current. Their vessel, built using only the materials and technologies available in the pre-Columbian period, was the Kon-Tiki – a raft composed of nine balsa tree trunks, each 45ft long by 2ft in diameter, lashed together with hemp ropes.

The explorers lived off water stored in bamboo tubes, coconuts, sweet potatoes, bottle gourds and fruit, and the fish, dolphins and sharks they caught. After sighting islands in French Polynesia, the raft struck a reef on August 7 and was beached on an uninhabited islet off Raroia in the Tuamotu group. Kon-Tiki had travelled a distance of some 3,770 nautical miles in 101 days at an average speed of 1½ knots.

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