Hello Thursday. You’re in danger of being relatively calm. What a beautiful feeling. I’ve been stressed, waking up with a panic deep in my chest, for days every waking’s felt like I was leaping out of a nightmare in which I was being chased, but without any visual or narrative to back it up. Of course, then I read the news.
I’m trying to take a break from that. At least till I’m up and making breakfast. Reading the news before breakfast is just a fool’s game.
My little corner of the world’s actually been quite good for the past several weeks. You can’t extend TOO far out of my little corner for things to resume their typical Hellscape, but Kristen and I have been having a grand ole time playing gigs, recording, playing with the cat, playing in the rain and running for cover.
Well. I play in the rain. Kristen runs for cover.
My open mics chug along, gigs plug along, the sun comes beating down and the rain doesn’t make things cooler, but merely provides a thickening of the atmosphere as if we’re breathing blood. BUT other than THAT – the play was fine!
I woke up to news that the Georgia Guidestones had been bombed. Probably an improvement in the state of the world despite a slight blemish on our species’ karma overall – a subject on which I have complicated thoughts if not complicated feelings.
I wrote a new song. It’s angry as foretold. The air conditioner in my car died. I’m sad about that. It’s a waiting game with Saturn, father of gods and mighty steed, aging though he be. Mayhaps he’ll get his historic plates. He’s deserving, though there are like to be no Saturn shows to attend any time soon.
If you think I’m kinda babbling, you’d be right.
So – I expect most people hadn’t heard of the Georgia Guidestones before this morning. It’s okay. It’s kind of a weird thing but it’s a good microcosm of just how fucked up these bizarre, passionate hotspots spring up over … NOTHINGS … that people spread misinformation and rumour about.
I really wonder how Dr. Herbert Kersten, the purported commissioner of the guidestones, thought of all the hullaballoo – though I think the majority of it probably came to a head AFTER he died in 2005 – since… the internet’s heyday hadn’t come yet.
I was aware of the Guidestones through my Love of Weird America type things, but mostly recall them as being the centre of a swirl of Satanist rumours. It was one of the more absurd Satanic Panic kind of laments floating around, but since it showed up in 1980 and the only easily available info on the builders at the time was that it was a group of “concerned American Christians” that had constructed it, I guess I can see how some OTHER concerned American Christians would be worried that a group of standing stones calling for people to Live in balance with nature, covered in Hebrew and Aramaic, might be the work of a Satanic cult… ?
Apparently in 2015 there was a documentary in which a group of (what else) concerned American Christians went to the banker who’d facilitated the construction as he was recovering from a stroke and tricked him into revealing the true identity of the guy who had put the Guidestones together – so yay – we know the identity (Dr. Kerston, a fan of neo-Nazism and white supremacy) – but what a shitty thing to do… That was totally off my radar until John Oliver did a bit about it in May, which ALSO was totally off my radar until Brian Dunning did a correction / follow up on HIS article about the Guidestones on June 21st.
In this context, when you go back and ACTUALLY read the inscriptions, which kick off with “MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000 IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE GUIDE REPRODUCTION WISELY…” – well, in the 80s getting the population down to 500 million would’ve meant culling around 4 billion people and now it becomes pretty clear what sort of people would be under the knife… so OBVIOUSLY it’s been finally revealed to be a white supremacist monument to New World Order and a “Guidestone” for eugenics and a left-wing bombmaker erased it…
But no, if you look at any of the reporting on the subject, that background is still pretty unknown. It’s “America’s Stonehenge”! It’s still a Satanic Monument. A local governor wanna-be ran on a platform on blowing it up, and even now is claiming that until shown otherwise, she chooses to believe that it was the HAND OF GOD that done smote the rocks. Add to that that the stone that was actually destroyed was the one sans European languages and it becomes more likely, perhaps, that no – this is some RIGHT-wing bombmaker striking a blow for God.
And of course the news just picks their bent and runs with it because they’re not quite sure what to make of it, they don’t do any more research than the bare minimum, and frankly, isn’t there more interesting stuff to talk about like an assassination in Japan, who left the door open at Robb and whether or not Squeegee Boys, though annoying and often stressful, deserve to be attacked with baseball bats?
If you’re interested in reading more about the Guidestones or want to check up on my thinking, please visit Skeptoid over at https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4837 – the Guidestones hadn’t been blown up when that was published (June 21st) so it’s the last segment in this post / podcast of follow-ups and corrections.
Oh – I meant to talk about :
