{"id":228,"date":"2011-07-03T07:17:12","date_gmt":"2011-07-03T14:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/wordpress\/?p=228"},"modified":"2014-01-06T07:19:34","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T14:19:34","slug":"an-american-monument","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/?p=228","title":{"rendered":"An American Monument"},"content":{"rendered":"

When it comes to celebrating our nation\u2019s birth, I\u2019ve always observed a\u00a0strict, 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.<\/p>\n

This year I broke with that tradition.<\/p>\n

Instead, I did something I\u2019ve 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\u2019ll find in Washington DC.<\/p>\n

The Georgia Guidestones have been called America\u2019s Stonehenge. Arranged in an\u00a0X<\/em>-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 \u201cR.C. Christian\u201d (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 \u201can Age of Reason\u201d on Planet Earth. The whole thing feels like a Reagan-era American\u2019s attempt to one-up Moses.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cBe not a cancer on the earth \u2013 Leave room for nature \u2013 Leave room for nature.\u201d The first, meanwhile, is at once the most specific and the most absurd of the directives: \u201cMaintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.\u201d (In case you\u2019re keeping count, we\u2019ve exceeded that limit by just a hair. Our species’ population is up to 7 billion, or 14 times Mr. Christian\u2019s recommendation.) We\u2019re also asked to \u201cunite humanity with a new living language\u201d and to \u201cavoid petty laws and useless officials.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bizarre and perplexing though the Guidestones\u2019 directives may be, one thing\u2019s for sure: in this country, at least, we\u2019ve ignored every one of them.<\/p>\n

We’re Americans, after all. We don\u2019t take orders.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Americans, you’ll find some interesting ones among the Guidestones’ visitors.<\/p>\n

Remember, Elbert County is not Washington DC. Should you trek across northeast Georgia\u2019s horse farms and rock quarries to get there, you won\u2019t find busloads of fourth-graders and fanny-packed Asian tourists paying homage to a once-great nation in the throes of decline. Rather you\u2019ll find, as I did, a truer sample of our countrymen: a short procession of sleeveless shirts, goatees and cellulite.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Protestant roots to a pair of visibly uncomfortable women.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a Christian country,” he\u00a0proclaimed. “The \u2018under God\u2019 part of our pledge of allegiance makes me proud. It makes me happy. And I\u2019ve got a constitutional right to pursue happiness. Some atheist don\u2019t like it, too bad; he can go do what makes\u00a0him<\/em>\u00a0happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, the phrase \u201cpursuit of happiness\u201d doesn\u2019t appear anywhere in the Constitution (it\u2019s in the Declaration of Independence), but it seemed paradoxically un-American for me to correct the man\u2019s American history. So I let him be, and lost myself in thoughts of the Guidestones and their cryptic messages and their anonymous designer.<\/p>\n

Three hours later, I realized I wouldn\u2019t have time to drive home to Birmingham. Besides, I was enjoying Georgia\u2019s outlands. I decided to head down to Elberton, the seat of Elbert County and the self-styled \u201cgranite capitol of the world,\u201d in search of a hotel.<\/p>\n

In the America I know and love, a lowball Priceline bid will book you a night\u2019s stay in just about any major city, provided you\u2019re willing to sacrifice concierge lounges and lavish continental breakfasts. Hell, I\u2019ve slept on Tempur-Pedic mattresses in three-star Atlanta establishments for $40 a night.<\/p>\n

Elberton was a different story. You\u2019d 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\u2019t pay less than $70 for a room in Elberton, and you\u2019re lucky to find one at all.<\/p>\n

After unsuccessful stops at the town\u2019s Days Inn and Econolodge, I found a vacancy at the DayNite Inn.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s license and pulled out an old pad of triplicate registration forms.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Computer\u2019s broken,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s the rate?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo-fifty a week,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

I understood, then, what I should have understood at the last two places I\u2019d stopped in: that Elberton\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The DayNite Inn, like the Guidestones, has its own directives. One of them is\u00a0handwritten\u00a0and Scotch-taped to the lobby counter:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Because in America, when a man\u2019s company downsizes or a bank repossesses his home and he\u2019s confronted with the choice of crashing in his in-law\u2019s guest room or sucking in his gut and making his own way, he\u2019ll take the latter route every time \u2013 even if that means cramming his kids into a tattered hotel room and using the bathroom towels to wash the family car.<\/p>\n

Maybe that\u2019s something we ought to celebrate. Maybe it says something about our Wild West resourcefulness or our spirit of resilience or our unflappable optimism.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m not so sure. I wonder whether things might be different, if only we\u2019d maintained humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When it comes to celebrating our nation\u2019s birth, I\u2019ve always observed a\u00a0strict, 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":229,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions\/229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}