THE GEORGIA GUIDESTONES AND AMERICA’S WEIRDNESS:

As a result of my “studies,” I knew that one of the strangest things about Georgia is its bizarre stone monument known as the “Georgia Guidestones.” Erected in rural Georgia in 1980, the Stonehenge-like configuration bears strange, cryptic messages, in multiple languages, about living in harmony with nature at a sustainable population and entering an “Age of Reason.” The identity of the builders is unknown, save for the name “Robert C. Christian,” who purportedly worked on behalf of a “small group of loyal Americans” to put the thing up. It’s an extremely mysterious structure (which is also an astronomical calendar); allegedly, it offers a kind of plan for rebuilding humanity after a future cataclysm. More-wild theories than that exist about the thing. And it has attracted its share of detractors over the years, being denounced both in Georgia and elsewhere as some kind of demonic conduit or as a keystone in various conspiracies, such as that old chestnut, the “New World Order.”

Well, all of the above description should be in the past tense, because the Georgia Guidestones are no more, as Diana Glebova reported for us. After an explosion destroyed part of the structure, the state government took down the rest, “for safety reasons.” Culprits are still being sought, but it seems likely that the structure’s controversial reputation (it has been vandalized before over the years) and place in conspiracy-theorist lore sufficed to ensure its destruction.

While property damage is never right, the timing of its destruction does bring things full circle — erected at the tail-end of the Carter era, and demolished almost a year and a half into his feckless successor.