Great going, nitwits. You ruined it. Since 1980, a quirky monument had stood in a field in the middle of nowhere, a few miles outside of a little Georgia town that's not quite in the middle of nowhere (but close enough the locals might give you directions). The town is the kind of hard-working place found all across the country, but it had something none of the others did: the Georgia Guidestones.
The Guidestones themselves, five tall, massive granite verticals with a partial stone cap, were covered in Cold War after-the-Bomb nonsense in a number of languages, purporting to offer guidance to humanity. The whole thing was supposedly funded by a mysterious, pseudonymous donor, and by a remarkable coincidence, the nearby town is home to granite quarries and stone carvers.
No sooner than the thing was up, it became a target for conspiracy theorists and other nutjobs. Preachers thundered it was the Devil's work and demanded it be torn down. New-Agers flocked to see it and do New-Agey things at the site. The tinfoil-hat crowd declared it a manifesto of the New World Order (which apparently picked a small Southern town well off the freeway to post their stuff for...reasons?). Tourists detoured to see it and take pictures. It was spray-painted, had pieces chipped off, prayed to, prayed over and grazed around by cattle.*
And yesterday, some idiot blew it up. Oh, not all the way up. But in quarrying country, it's not impossible to lay hands on a little kaboom material. The blast did enough damage that what was left was unstable, that huge capstone hanging precariously over the heads of gawkers, so the county knocked the rest of thing over later in the day.
Goodbye, silly monument! Goodbye, American Stonehenge! At 42 years, you never came close to the 5,000 year old monument in Britain; America is the land of the eternally-wiped slate, the everlasting tabula rasa, and some blank-minded fool has got this one razed.
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* The original landowner had been granted grazing rights in perpetuity by the unknown donor.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
6 comments:
Looks like Carhenge near Alliance NE will outlive it. :)
I would never have known of the existence of the thing had some goofball not blown it up.
In my state, we have the Heavener Runestone - which was at one time claimed to be evidence Vikings visited the (central!) US. It's a fake, probably made in the late 18th or 19th century. I want to go see it some time for kicks and grins, but it's about a four hour drive from me. Maybe I better plan on that in case someone takes a mind to do a little light vandalism....
The world just got a little bit more boring, and that's a crying shame. I wasn't going to take a 7+ hour drive to see them, but was keeping an eye out for road trips in the general direction. *sigh* Too late now.
I mean, it's not like the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas, but still.
"I mean, it's not like the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas, but still."
It is, writ small. And, like the Taliban, they won't rest until they're in charge of everything.
Fireworks are outlawed after July 5th in our whereabouts, but we must destroy stuff!
Brian Dunning of Skeptoid has the lowdown on the origin of the Georgia Guidestones.
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4198
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