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good place to
10 FLAGPOLE.COM NOVEMBER 15,2006 NEWS & FEATURES I ARTS & EVENTS I MOVIES I MUSIC I COMICS & ADVICE I CLASSIFIEDS
et Earth rendered as inert and lifeless as, say,
Jupiter?" Well, assuming human survival, I dis
covered that, yea, verily. The Guidestones would
probably make a pretty good meeting place—a
kind of thermonuclear Honeycomb Hideout—for
humanity's scattered remnants. That granite is
over 300 million years old, you know. Its prime
location, atop one of the region's many rolling
hillocks, is also advantageous for spotting allies
of survival, potential mates for global repopula
tion, and the inevitable bands of marauding,
mutant punk rocker cannibals. Good stuff. Aside
from all that, the whole thing functions as a
pretty intense piece of art for us pre-apocalyptic
folks, too. I mean, the granite slabs are meant
to evoke "monument" as well as "guiuepost."
And "monument” is just a prettier way of saying
"tombstone," so the Guidestones are sorta like a
tombstone for the entire world population.
Heavy enough for you? (No wonder R.C.
Christian got so much attention that day he
placed his order at the finishing company.)
Personally, the Stones reminded me of the
haunting occasion when I visited my family's
cemetery plot, poked around, and spied my still-
alive-and-well Grandma's empty plot. She was
standing right next to me. "Some day, but not
any time soon," I hoped. And that was that. Add
this personal and global death anxiety to the
controversy of the provocative words of "advice"
scribed into the stones and you've got yourself
a complex and dynamic little piece of work out
north of Elberton. And it's out there right now.
waiting for you to come visit. Why not? It's
cool. It's free. And best of all. you don't have
to take an airplane to get there. So feel free to
bring along all the bottled water you want. You
can even clip your toenails, peel a peach with a
pocketknife, and recite the Koran aloud out there.
Nobody's gonna hassle you. Not in Elbert County,
the county seat of the apocalypse. As for the
world being all wrong, well... keep in mind that
the Guidestones were built in the late 1970s and
came into their own in the early '80s, when the
Cold War was ripening. Russia was in Afghanistan
and the Arms Race was rocking. Every American
was terrified of Russia, deep in their guts. It
was a bleak time for our country and the world.
Nowadays, things are either, better, worse or
much worse, depending on who you talk to. And
all of 'em are probably right. Me and The Missus—
you might say we're conflicted on the issue. I'm
more jaded than she is, that's for damn si:re. But
we're both still sane enough to have hope. And
we both give a hell about the world around us,
however apocalypse-bound we might all De.
Jonathan Ralley
Jonathan Railey is a psychotherapist practicing in Athens.
THE GEORGIA BAR
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T he world is all wrong. I mean it. I'm not
saying we're all damned to Hell, but take a
look abound. You'll find avarice, hopeless
ness, human sacrifice, ecological destiuction.
Styrofoam food, a lobotomized pop culture,
ambient noise, and a world population that
keeps spreading and sprawling out across the
globe like a Rorschach blot on your mee-maw's
Easter tablecloth. Sure, there's other stuff, too.
Good stuff tike generosity, courage and selfless
ness that could easily lead to a near-miraculous
fourth-quarter recovery for our species. And who
knows how it's all gonna go down? Personalty,
I'm open to the possibility of an indestructible
sanity within the heart of mankind that helps us
to make a late save. But I’m also keenly aware of
the obviously foul Zeitgeist 1 got born into. Like
most people from my generation (first-generation
latchkey kids who grew up on movies like The
Day After and War Games and who enjoyed high
scores on a video game named "Rush'n Attack"),
I'm half-expecting the world to blow up at any
minute. And. yes, okay, maybe I've got some un
resolved psychological issues there. But seriously,
when you can't carry a bottle of water onto an
airplane because it might be a bomb, the End Of
The World As We Know It must be nigh.
And so for the purposes of having a game
plan, let's just go ahead and mentally flash to
bang time: You're at Sanford Stadium, trashed,
screaming "Go Dawgs! Sic 'em!" when you see
the airplane. Then there's a light in the sky, some
shockwaves and an atomic boom. Fade to the
smell of sulfur and melting clocks, 30 years of
pitch-black night, and a handful of survivors left
to wander through the fallout, in search of po
table water and grub. Oh yeah, and they're also
in search of safe asylum from the nuclear mu
tants who will most probably, in all likelihood, be
cannibals as well. And how will Georgians, and
in fact all of mankind, know where to regroup
after the Big Bad Bang? What will bring order
to the scattered remnants of humanity once it
has all but obliterated itself? Why, the Georgia
Guidestones in Elbert County, of course.
Mysterious Stranger
For those who don't know, the Guidestones are
a piece of local history along the lines of the Iron
Horse, The Tree That Owns Itself, and that dense
Japanese bamboo thicket on Grady Avenue: road
side oddities of peculiar origin that don't really
fit with their surroundings in any conventional
way. You drive by any of these places and, unless
you're running late on your way to prayer meeting
or "The Simpsons," you'll pull over, roll down your
window to marvel at the weirdness of it and cry
to your sweet thing riding shotgun, "Damn, baby.
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Welcome to
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246 E. Clayton
There has got to be a story there!" And man,
yeah, there's a story to the Georgia Guidestones
all right. Here’s the bare bones (as told to me by
my father, who heard it from his colleague, Jack
Wiggins, who knows everything): One summer in
the late 1970s, a mysterious, well-dressed strang
er arrived in Elberton, GA, and walked through
the door of Elberton Granite Finishing Company.
He sat right down and said something like, "You
can call me R.C. Christian, thougMhat ain't my
real name." He then proceeded to place an order
massive and bizarre enough to garner the atten
tion of the president of the company, who—ac
cording to the legend—decided to meet with the
mysterious R.C. Christian for a little tete-a-tete.
In private. Christian explained to the president
of the yranite company that he wanted to erect
a numuti of 19-foot-tall granite slabs on some
nearby land and engrave them with words for
future generations to survive by. There might've
been some talk about Thomas "Age Of Reason"
Paine, who was, ostensibly, a big inspiration for
the mysterious man. And there was certainly talk
of funding, as in "Do you have a way to pay for
this?" and "Yes, indeed, I do."
That was the deal. The rest is Georgia history.
The Georgia Guidestones, as they came to be
known, were erected out in a pasture eight miles
north of Elberton on Georgia Hwy. 77. They were
engraved with a set of 10 admonitions about hu
man civilization and ecological harmony, present
ed in eight different translations. (After all, when
the End Of Time comes, the handful of survivors
left wandering the Earth like Charlton Heston in
Omega Man could be from just about anywhere:
Egypt. Guatemala, Israel—you name it.) Also,
there were holes strategically drilled in the pil
lars, to be used for sighting celestial events and
keeping time after the nuclear holocaust.
See For Yourself
If you want to see this for yourself, just head
on out there. They've got a nice little gravel park
ing lot, some rose bushes planted, and a placard
with detailed specs of the Guidestones (and a
mysterious reference to a time capsule planted
nearby, to be dug up on a date left unspecified).
The Missus and I drove out there in our Ford
Taurus a few weeks ago, for our first somber/
inspirational gander at the Guidestones. It was a
sunny and clear day, so we had to squint in order
to imagine a post-apocalyptic atmosphere of
radiation and toxicity. Our dog. Stella, frolicked
and galloped around the pillars. I threw sticks
for her to retrieve and wondered, "What wily ani
mals—besides cockroaches—will survive the wa-.
ter bottle bomb that ends All Creation? Will any?
Or will the slate be wiped totally clean and plan