When it comes to celebrating our nation’s birth, I’ve always observed a strict, time-honored tradition passed down through generations of proud, red-blooded American males: I waterboard myself with keg beer and ground beef until my sunburnt legs buckle under the weight of my bloated midsection and I collapse onto a patio chair somewhere.
This year I broke with that tradition.
Instead, I did something I’ve wanted to do for a long time now. I fueled up my car and drove it 300 miles east to Elbert County, Georgia, where I visited a monument far more American than anything you’ll find in Washington DC.
The Georgia Guidestones have been called America’s Stonehenge. Arranged in an X-formation atop a hill on state-owned farmland, the Guidestones comprise five 16-foot granite slabs crowned by a 12-ton capstone, all erected in 1980 under the direction of a mysterious individual known only as “R.C. Christian” (an alias). The stones feature slots and apertures whose positions correspond, a la Stonehenge, to various astronomical events and phenomena. And engraved in eight languages upon four of these colossal granite tablets is a set of ten directives, a kind of socioeconomic recipe for achieving “an Age of Reason” on Planet Earth. The whole thing feels like a Reagan-era American’s attempt to one-up Moses.
The directives are themselves a strange blend of Jeffersonian agrarianism and hippie utopianism, grammatically casual and fraught with more dashes than an Emily Dickinson poem. The tenth, for example, reads: “Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.” The first, meanwhile, is at once the most specific and the most absurd of the directives: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.” (In case you’re keeping count, we’ve exceeded that limit by just a hair. Our species’ population is up to 7 billion, or 14 times Mr. Christian’s recommendation.) We’re also asked to “unite humanity with a new living language” and to “avoid petty laws and useless officials.”
Bizarre and perplexing though the Guidestones’ directives may be, one thing’s for sure: in this country, at least, we’ve ignored every one of them.
We’re Americans, after all. We don’t take orders.
Speaking of Americans, you’ll find some interesting ones among the Guidestones’ visitors.
Remember, Elbert County is not Washington DC. Should you trek across northeast Georgia’s horse farms and rock quarries to get there, you won’t find busloads of fourth-graders and fanny-packed Asian tourists paying homage to a once-great nation in the throes of decline. Rather you’ll find, as I did, a truer sample of our countrymen: a short procession of sleeveless shirts, goatees and cellulite.
One guy who looked like he might have bankrupted a few all-you-can-eat buffets stood in the center of the monument ranting about America’s Protestant roots to a pair of visibly uncomfortable women.
“This is a Christian country,” he proclaimed. “The ‘under God’ part of our pledge of allegiance makes me proud. It makes me happy. And I’ve got a constitutional right to pursue happiness. Some atheist don’t like it, too bad; he can go do what makes him happy.”
Of course, the phrase “pursuit of happiness” doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution (it’s in the Declaration of Independence), but it seemed paradoxically un-American for me to correct the man’s American history. So I let him be, and lost myself in thoughts of the Guidestones and their cryptic messages and their anonymous designer.
Three hours later, I realized I wouldn’t have time to drive home to Birmingham. Besides, I was enjoying Georgia’s outlands. I decided to head down to Elberton, the seat of Elbert County and the self-styled “granite capitol of the world,” in search of a hotel.
In the America I know and love, a lowball Priceline bid will book you a night’s stay in just about any major city, provided you’re willing to sacrifice concierge lounges and lavish continental breakfasts. Hell, I’ve slept on Tempur-Pedic mattresses in three-star Atlanta establishments for $40 a night.
Elberton was a different story. You’d sooner find a vegan in its city limits than a Tempur-Pedic mattress. All the hotels are threadbare. All the neighborhoods are hardscrabble. Yet somehow, you won’t pay less than $70 for a room in Elberton, and you’re lucky to find one at all.
After unsuccessful stops at the town’s Days Inn and Econolodge, I found a vacancy at the DayNite Inn.
The lady at the front desk looked exhausted. She was old, stooped over, and encumbered by a pair of eyeglasses so thick they might have induced whiplash. She seemed ashamed of herself for having only a smoking room with a single bed to offer me. When I said that was fine, she asked me for my driver’s license and pulled out an old pad of triplicate registration forms.
“Computer’s broken,” she explained. She said it accusingly, as though the failure of that ancient device and its dot-matrix printer were to be blamed for all of her hardships.
“What’s the rate?” I asked.
“Two-fifty a week,” she said.
I understood, then, what I should have understood at the last two places I’d stopped in: that Elberton’s hotels were full not of passersby and weekenders, like myself, but of residents. Of down-on-their-luck locals defying homelessness one week at a time.
The DayNite Inn, like the Guidestones, has its own directives. One of them is handwritten and Scotch-taped to the lobby counter:
Because in America, when a man’s company downsizes or a bank repossesses his home and he’s confronted with the choice of crashing in his in-law’s guest room or sucking in his gut and making his own way, he’ll take the latter route every time – even if that means cramming his kids into a tattered hotel room and using the bathroom towels to wash the family car.
Maybe that’s something we ought to celebrate. Maybe it says something about our Wild West resourcefulness or our spirit of resilience or our unflappable optimism.
But I’m not so sure. I wonder whether things might be different, if only we’d maintained humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.