Saturday, April 28, 2012
Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media mogul, is back in the news. The 21st-Century’s answer to William Randolph Hearst (comedian Jon Stewart calls him Citizen Shame) has once again been dragged away from his yacht to answer questions. An investigative panel wants the what-did-he-knows and when-did-he-know-its about the bribing of cops and the hacking of murder victims’ cell phones for sensational press.
Also in late April, a new survey came out in the American media about the American media, concluding that – surprise! – most of the stories reported on the news are mindlessly superficial.
We’ve just been through a month that saw the Sun triggering the Mercury-Pluto opposition in the US chart (the signature of propaganda), transiting Pluto (corruption) stationing en route to its exact square with Uranus (sudden revelation), and Mars stationing opposed to transiting Neptune (mass hypnosis). It’s time to take another look at the nature of the information we take into our consciousness.
It is odd, in a way, how undiscriminating most of us are about where our news comes from. Especially given how careful we are becoming about, say, the origins of our food (consider how unanimously the public rejected ground beef after the recent expose about “pink slime”). In order to stay sane during the years ahead, we need to be no less careful about how much mental nutrition vs. toxicity is in the media we consume.
News channels give the public what it seems to want, and the public grows to want more of what they are offered. It’s a vicious circle of dumbness. We are conditioned at this point to desire the most late-breaking coverage possible; that is, the up-to-the-minuteness of a given event – not its meaning – is presented as its most important value. Also popular is triviality: the maximum amount of airtime is devoted to the silliest possible non-events; for example, Mitt Romney strapping his dog to the roof of his car thirty years ago. The stories that get mentioned paint a picture of the world that is so meaningless and insubstantial as to keep viewers from remembering how to use their minds, let along from achieving clarity of mind.
But the perniciousness of the media lies not just in its content but in its form. On TV events are highlighted piecemeal, without context or continuity, suggesting a soulless randomness. All tarted up with exclamatory candy-colored graphics, news stories seem to be intended to appeal to an audience of kindergarteners with attention deficit disorder — which, as has been well-noted, viewers of the mass media increasingly resemble. The viewer who hears a cursory mention of a terrible famine somewhere in the world, only to have the program abruptly cut to a commercial for fast food, risks the development of a peculiarly modern spiritual disconnection.
It is telling that it is in China right now that the breathless vapidity of the infotainment industry is especially striking. In the efforts of this newly ascendant superpower to out-capitalism the capitalists, China is mirroring back to us the manic look-and-feel of US pop culture, rendered extra obvious via the crassness of imitation. Consider the popular Chinese magazine whose title translates to: “Next!”
It’s a means of disseminating information that not only fails to encourage a holistic understanding of what’s going on in the world, but actively discourages it. Thus are the failures of the media not merely stupidly innocuous but dangerous. During these years of the Cardinal Cross, we are up against the challenge of keeping our minds and hearts open amidst an onslaught of very disturbing world events, while maintaining a grounded, thoughtful equanimity. More than ever before, we require intelligence sources of the highest quality.
The New Media poses another problem. Digital gadgets further undercut our ability to truly absorb important information: taking the time to subject it to our personal values and ethics, so we know how to use it. In the wild world of cyber data, abbreviation and speed are valued over subtlety of thought and expression. We are kept from reflecting long enough upon anything to discern patterns of meaning in it, let alone to get in touch with our feelings about it.
We really can’t afford to be drawn off focus like this. As meaning-seekers facing a rip-roaring ride over the next few years, we need our brain cells as healthy as we can keep them. This means staying vigilant about whose point of view is behind the media we are consuming. What agenda is our favorite news program pushing? Who’s sponsoring the radio show we’re listening to? What motivation does Goldman Sachs have for underwriting those tasteful PBS series?
In order to stay plugged in, we need the media. But we also need to see it as no more or less than a tool, a resource — to be used by us, not the other way around.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
I guess you could say March came in like a lion… if the lion was brain-damaged, gynophobic and high on meth .
In the USA, Republicans reinvigorated the 19th-century war on birth control, Rush Limbaugh called a Democratic law student a slut, and a Montana judge sniggered in an email that the president’s mother had had sex with a dog. Such is the state of American public discourse as the Equinox gets ready to shoot us into Phase 2 of the Cardinal Crossroads.
Meanwhile, at the U.N., where Uncle Sam continues to call the shots, Iran is being cast as the next evil country to “get tough” about. That this pistol-packin’ cowboy buffoonery could still be considered a viable approach to international affairs in the current world, crippled as it already is by financial, environmental and military chaos, can only strike a thinking person as completely insane.
Memory Loss
The good citizens of the NATO countries seem to be suffering from total memory loss as regards the last time they let their leaders drag them into a protracted tragic mess in the Middle East (and the war in Iraq is by no means over. Overseen by the biggest embassy in the world, CIA spies and Special Ops have a firmer foothold than ever in the country Uncle Sam has turned into a semi-permanent war zone.) Further heating up the rhetoric right now is the fact that the USA, Iran and Israel all happen to be preparing for elections at the same time. So, with grim predictability, we are seeing jingoistic, trigger-happy posturing winning the day, while appeals to reasoned diplomacy are derided as cowardly and unpatriotic.
With retrograde Mars (machismo run amok) and the Pluto-Uranus square triggered all through the month (see the March Skywatch), we are hearing every cynical politician with a bully pulpit trying to score points with saber-rattling grandiosity. The US candidates are putting on a particularly detestable display, each trying to outdo the other with escalating threats against Iran; not excluding the president, with his dark hints about “military solutions” — an oxymoron if there ever was one.
Not surprisingly with Pluto (destruction) in Capricorn (monetary infrastructures), so far the strategies Uncle Sam has up its sleeve against Iran are largely economic. Warfare is becoming more and more a starkly financial enterprise: “sanctions” really means economic strangulation. Having failed to bring Iran to its knees through spy plots and assassinations, Washington’s new plan seems to be to weaken its economy enough that the government collapses.
History-challenged Americans seem to have no clue about how chillingly the current scenario parallels their government’s machinations from sixty years ago, when the CIA coup toppled the democratically elected government in Iran, and installed the shah in its place. This inaugurated a 25-year-long reign of horror for ordinary Iranians, while shoveling their country’s resources over to US oil companies and banks.
Seized Assets
In recent months Uncle Sam has seized tens of billions of dollars of Iranian assets. Surrounded by U.S.-occupied countries and well aware of the abiding desire of American corporations for the oil beneath their feet, the Iranian people know all too well what really motivates this global nastiness. Contrary to media spin, the goal NATO leaders are pursuing in Iran has nothing to do with human rights, and everything to do with raw power.
It is Plutonian logic, not practical logic, that would lead an American to believe that his own country, with its stockpile of 10 and a half thousand nuclear warheads, and its unique position of being the only country in the world to have actually used nuclear weapons, should be the one to dictate international nuclear policy. Indeed, at the same time that inflammatory warnings about Iran’s nuclear program blare forth from his TV set, the American taxpayer is paying for the U.S. Department of Energy to triple its own nuke budget.
Washington’s long term plans for Iran are a textbook case of the Sibly chart’s misused Pluto (total control) in the 2nd house (resources). These plans involve casting Israel in the role of regional strongman, as a means of keeping the Middle East safe for American interests. That is, safe for the financial interests of the American 1%. In every other way, arming to the teeth a reactionary regime like Israel’s represents the exact opposite of safety.
Its arsenals fattened with US-taxpayer-subsidized weapons, Israel has consistently refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as it has refused to allow international monitors to inspect its arsenals. Neither of these dangerous gestures has elicited a peep of protest from the American and European politicians fulsomely sputtering right now about Israel’s sui generis “right to defend itself”. With Netanyahu’s visit under Mars-inflamed skies, the war rhetoric ratchets up higher by the day.
Uranus-Pluto
As the Uranus-Pluto square builds to exactitude (first hit: June 24th) the air is buzzing with polarization. The essential conflict here, however, is not the over-hyped contest between the various stooges of American electoral politics. Nor is it a conflict between one country and another. The real choice point right now is one that is activating the minds and hearts of world citizens everywhere: the one between the power of change and the forces of fear.
Though we don’t hear much about them on the news, the numbers of individuals being inspired (Uranus) by the power of change (Pluto) right now are multiplying exponentially. For example, in the USA environmentalists are suing to block construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia that would be the nation’s first since 1978. In Japan, where the nuclear reactors damaged in last year’s quake have sprung new leaks, clean-energy activists continue to organize and protest despite a blackout of reportage on their activities. In Germany and France, the anti-nuke movement is even stronger.
In Russia, dissidents against Putin’s corrupt government have refused to be silenced despite a campaign of suppression that has included assassination. In Syria, Yemen, Jordan and Bahrain, despots (Pluto) continue to brutalize participants in popular protests (Uranus); but the activists keep coming back, filling public arenas and city squares. Even in Israel, last month attorney general Yehuda Weinstein declared unconstitutional Knesset bills that would sharply restrict funding for human rights groups.
Power of Change
We are living in a time when the power of change to transform the world will not and cannot be stopped. Ordinary people are far less geo-politically naive than a generation ago, and able to see global patterns for what they are. Few who have been watching the world scene can kid themselves that the conflicts of the past two years are isolated flashes in the pan. For our part, astrologers have been saying for a while now that the forces of negative Pluto can be expected to tighten their grip — not relax it — when up against Uranus, as the square reaches exactitude between now and 2016.
In the months and years upcoming we need to get into the habit of taking the long view on the world situation. Bemoaning conflict is not enough; we need to remember what these energies signify. The Cardinal Crossroads period is forcing long-unquestioned injustices, obsolete group assumptions and mass delusions to the fore. With each new global event that arises, the healthy response is to resist the fear reaction, and get in touch with the intelligence and courage that is innate in each of us.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Is there a lot of kvetching in your life right now? It wouldn’t be surprising, given that Mars is in Virgo, and retrograde to boot. This transit is great for editing and tweaking: incremental reform. But if unconsciously channeled, it makes us prickly and irritable. In Virgo, Mars’s default is fuss and worry.
What’s especially interesting is that the sign opposite Virgo — Pisces — is getting a lot of action right now as well, from Neptune and Chiron. We have here the planet of aggression, rendered all skeptical and fidgety by Virgo, coming up against two mysterious forces whose modus operandi is passivity and indirectness.
Neptune and Chiron are blurring the clarity of what Mars is doing and what it thinks it wants. They are pouring energies from the right brain into the workings of Virgo, an otherwise straight-ahead, left-brain sign. Those who tend to use Virgo for fussing and worrying will find that these Pisces planets are providing plenty to fuss and worry about.
In the social arena, we see an orgy of fault-finding (Mars in Virgo) operating against the backdrop of an elusive, vacillating mass mood (Neptune, Chiron in Pisces) that disdains practical considerations. Examples abound of obsessive nitpicking fed by unconscious spiritual malaise. Consider the fuss being made right now about birth control by the Catholic Church, an institution that has displayed an astounding lack of concern over child rape.
For the USA in particular, the War of the Mutables is raging. America’s natal Mars-Neptune square is being provoked by transiting Mars; its station last month was exact within a degree. The transit’s effect on the national climate is to thicken the fog of emotional reactivity while emboldening the agents of blame.
The country’s ongoing political vaudeville act, recently described by no less a critic than Fidel Castro as “the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been”, sets the scene for an endless stream of complaint unconnected to any rational methodology for improvement. “Freedom from big government,” chant the GOP nominees, a call to arms that gets foggier and vaguer with every repetition, hypnotizing (Neptune) their base into forgetting the facts of recent history, e.g. the role these guys played in the Wall Street bailouts.
The recent fog fight over a Clint Eastwood commercial that aired during the Super Bowl is another example of outsized group feeling pitted against real-life details. The ad was a standard-issue bit of capitalist jingoism, on the order of “What’s good for General Motors [updated here to Chrysler] is good for the USA”. Juiced up with movie-star glamor (Pisces), it was the kind of sales pitch we hear regularly from the spin departments of both political parties. But the ever-vigilant Karl Rove found grounds in it for partisan point-scoring, and up rose a great hue and cry of impassioned noises from pundits and populace alike.
Pisces isn’t about to let a little thing like facts prevent it from indulging in a good drama. Amidst the hooplah was a pesky bit of relevant data that managed to get lost in the fray: the company in question is no longer American. Italy’s Fiat SpA now owns a majority of Chrysler.
Culture analysts of the future will surely roll their eyes incredulously when reading about societal antics such as these. As denizens of the present, we can take heart from remembering that each of us, as individuals, has a better shot at channeling these energies creatively than the group as a whole has. The only way humanity’s consciousness gets raised is one person at a time.
The 14-year tenure of Neptune in Pisces, the sign of its rulership, is a teaching about healing at the soul level. The more we open to it, the more we will change our lives in subtle but unmistakable ways (see my lecture The Surrounding Sea. In the Skywatch for March, I’ll be talking about the Pisces tenure of Chiron, the mythic teacher of heroes.)
These transits guarantee that we will be taught, but they don’t guarantee that we will learn. Learning depends on whether mindfulness is brought to bear. To the extent that it is, the impulses we’re getting from Mars in Virgo will be beautifully blended with the grand, sweeping sensitivities of the Pisces cluster. Then a perfect balance is achieved, with each sign revealing its most exalted side to the other. This is exactly what we need to happen, as 2012 gains momentum.
Monday, January 9, 2012
 Astrologers have been talking about the Uranus-Pluto square for so long that we risk forgetting to be amazed when its energies play out the way they have. The momentous uprisings and financial turbulence with which the transit expressed itself in 2011 were such exact illustrations of the planetary energies as to match our wildest predictive metaphors. The epochal clash between the corrupt old (Pluto) and the revolutionary new (Uranus) is acting itself out in front of our eyes.
We are living in a thrilling moment in history. As 2012 hits the ground running, deep-structure change is in the air.
Pluto, the planet that shows us the mortality of all things, is strengthened during the month of January by the Sun’s passage through Capricorn, the sign of economic theories and political structures. There are reminders everywhere that even those institutions we tend to see as eternal are merely temporary constructs. Pluto asks one question of the systems governed by its resident sign: Are they promoting the healthy functioning of human beings and other living things? If not, they must go the way of everything else in decay. If a social institution has started to turn against the people it was set up to serve, it’s dustbin-of-history time.
Capitalism is one of these systems. In its current state it is rotting from within. Despite the fact that most of us are conditioned to equate capitalism with modernity — indeed, with civilization itself — this economic model is no more immortal than anything else under the Sun. Under skies galvanized by the Longest Arm of the Cross, everywhere we look we see “free market” capitalism in its death throes.
Neoconservatives don’t talk much about the dubious effects of the capitalist flood that swept over Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor about the environmental and cultural desecration wrought by China’s voracious entry into the GDP sweepstakes. As for Uncle Sam, king of capitalism for the last two centuries, he is finding himself smack dab in the middle of the Uranus-Pluto square (America’s natal aspects become a full-on Grand Cross when the transit is factored in).
With a self-image that revolves around material wealth, America is now going through not just a financial trauma but a breakdown of its core identity (Pluto opposite US Sun). The notion of being the richest country in the world is so central to the nation’s view of itself that many Americans have failed to grasp the fact that right now, in 2012, the only thing the US economy leads in is military might and people in prison.
In many ways, of course, robber-baron-style capitalism has been wildly successful. It has generated untold amounts of wealth for a tiny sector of humanity, and has established networks of profit that have undermined whole governments – as, for example, the donor-lobbyist-representative axis in Washington that has undermined U.S. democracy. Follow the logic of capitalism along its natural trajectory and you get the immensely profitable business of trafficking and selling illegal drugs, which constitutes what is perhaps the most stunning financial success story of our era (worldwide, it is thought to be a four-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year industry), ranking it right up there with the oil companies and the arms trade.
But under skies like these, visionaries are challenging even the most entrenched and the least questioned of Capricorn operations. Uranus, the planet of people power, is capable of transforming the plutocratic state (Pluto) of modern capitalism. An example of this is the entry into the public discussion of indie capitalism, a radical challenge to business as usual, in every sense of the phrase.
Indie capitalism is based not on trading old value, but on creating new value. It is not globally but locally oriented. It is concerned not with quantity but quality; and its modus operandi is sharing rather than exploiting.
Consider Kickstarter, the internet creative funding phenomenon whereby people invest and observe the growth of products that mean something to them personally. In this model, says proponent Bruce Nussbaum, consumer, investor, audience, fan, helper, and producer conflate. People find and prepare their food the same way they find and prepare their music. And then they share it all.
The courage to challenge (Uranus) and reformulate (Pluto) even such a powerful phenomenon as big global capitalism may seem like a David and Goliath battle. But tackling huge power differentials like these is exactly what this transit is about. Giants are big, but they are mortal, and not exempt from Plutonian law. The symbolism in the skies suggests that when entities such as these start to putrefy, we should collectively grab our shovels and bury them.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
It was when Mars (anger, militancy) opposed Neptune (confusion, pretense) as it was turning direct, just before November’s Full Moon, that the tide began to turn.
After being caught with their pants down for a few weeks, the media seems to have found its voice as regards the Occupy movement. Editorials condemning the encampments are coming out thick and fast. Mayors who were on the fence are caving in to city councils suddenly all up in their tough-guy boots. Reporters are furrowing their brows with sympathy as they listen to shop owners complaining that the presence of protesters downtown is scaring customers away from their designer soaps.
An article on the front page of yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle seemed intended to psychologically prep the public for today’s eviction of the tent city. The photo they chose to accompany it featured a scruffy, barefoot camper looking down from his perch in a makeshift tree house, wearing a malevolent Charles Manson-like grin.
What rationale are our city fathers using to justify their shift to strong-arm tactics? It seems they are concerned about health hazards among the Occupiers. This was suggested not so much by empirical evidence, because there wasn’t any, but by troubling associations some folks at City Hall have with camping equipment.
Funny thing: during Tahrir Square, you didn’t hear many complaints about hygiene.
Another historical parallel we might draw is that of the tent city that sprang up in San Francisco after the quake of 1906. Back then, every park and public space was covered with survivors cooking stew over campfires in front of ragged lean-tos.
But unlike the Occupiers in Oakland last month and in New York this morning, the squatters in 1906 weren’t cited for violating zoning laws. They weren’t dragged out of their tents by police and beaten with batons. In fact, I imagine the officers did all they could to help them. After fires, floods and power outages, people tend to see past the rules. Zoning ordinances mean little in a crisis.
What is being overlooked by those who are protesting the Occupy protests is that what’s happening right now is a real-time, world-scale, bona fide crisis.
Unconsciously, of course, everybody knows this. The movement’s middle-class foes, clinging to the shreds of their American Dream, wish the protesters would just go away. But their discomfort comes from being reminded of the ugly truths to which the occupiers are calling attention. Those who have seen Walker Evans’ Depression-era photographs may look at the new tent cities and shudder, seeing the Hoovervilles of the 1930s. The parallel is valid.
With Pluto in Capricorn (financial infrastructures) being inflamed by Uranus in Aries (militant rebellion), demonstrations against economic injustice have sprung up from East London to Johannesburg, from Rio de Janeiro to New Zealand. Europe is an economic war zone. The governments of Italy, Ireland and Portugal have been toppled; in Greece there is rioting in the streets. In Somalia and other African states the bloodshed is fueled by mortal poverty. In India there are fifteen suicides every hour due to financial despair.
In the USA, unregulated tycoons and untaxed corporate billionaires stockpile ever greater stores of wealth while unemployment and homelessness soar. Young people stagger out of school under the weight of obscene amounts of debt from student loans, while their college administrators award themselves sky-high raises.
Here in liberal Northern California, elected officials affect a solemn sincerity when explaining their policies towards the Occupiers. The other day, before the cops routed the tents, the mayor’s spokes-flack seemed especially ambivalent in front of the cameras. The official eviction announcement was prefaced, as usual, with a statement about how much “we sympathize with them” (always them); and ended, as usual, with a stern reminder that they are breaking the law.
Elsewhere in the news we heard that Chevron’s third-quarter profits were more than double last year’s, and just shy of an all-time record for any quarter.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
It’s hard to believe the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon is just over a month old.  Long expected by astrologers, long awaited by progressives and long dreaded by the One Per Cent, the movement hit the ground running.
It expresses the world moment so precisely that it seems to have arisen full-blown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Germinating since 2008 when Pluto entered Capricorn, it is an organic consequence of the dirty secrets that were revealed when the economy went bust.
Four years later, no one who has been paying attention requires a bullet-point explanation of “what the protestors want.” In a society where corporate criminals get six-figure bonuses while unemployment remains in the double digits (if you count the jobless who have given up looking), the question would seem to be not “Why are these people in the streets?” but rather, “Why aren’t 99% of us in the streets?”
None of the Wall Street gamblers was punished after their greed and chicanery pitched the world into a recession; indeed, right now their henchmen are lobbying their tiny little hearts out in the halls of Congress, trying to gut proposed regulations that could prevent another meltdown. None of these One-Per-Centers went to jail; none had his ill-gotten gains repossessed. By contrast, plenty of protestors have been arrested, some violently attacked by police (this video was shot on October 25th, in Oakland). Many have had their tents seized and their bare-bones equipment impounded.
Some of the OWS campers traveled hundreds of miles to make their voices heard. They have no party backing to launch campaigns, so they put their bodies on the ground. They have no corporate funding to pay for media ads, so they put the word out through Twitter. They can’t afford to stay at hotels, so they bring their sleeping bags to city squares and parks — the last public spaces that remain, in a society that’s hurtling towards full-on privatization.
And what do we hear from the White House, as the most significant mass movement since the ’60s spreads like wildfire to thousands of cities around the world? We hear about a “terrorist threat” featuring Iran, a country the Pentagon has been hankering to attack for years. And we hear about the assassination of yet another Bad Guy, this time in Libya.
Those who observe the American media from a distance will have noticed a pattern in these news stories. They are a testament to just how big a threat the OWS movement poses to the One Per Cent, who tend to pump sabre-rattling incidents into the public conversation whenever they think the 99% need distracting.
Oh, and suddenly the president has decided to crack down on medical pot.
It is clear to most Americans that the issues the protestors are identifying cannot be solved from within the hopelessly corrupt system of electoral politics. The power behind OWS comes from forces that exist outside of the official narrative, just as the outer planets that symbolize these forces exist outside the orbit of Saturn (status quo).
This cultural paroxysm, a domestic version of the Arab Spring, is a manifestation of the definitive transit of the 2012 years: the square between Uranus and Pluto. Uranus works by disruption. It interrupts the complacency of everyday life, challenging society to change; like the protestors whose presence downtown disturbs business as usual. Pluto works by exposing decay, so that what is degenerating in a collective can cede the way to regeneration.
Degeneration is just as crucial as regeneration; breakdown is just as sacred as rebirth. During the years ahead Uranus and Pluto will finger what is standing in the way of evolution, so that obsolete structures can cleanly fall away. But neither of these planets presumes to offer solutions. What they do is point the finger at problems.
What happens after that? Here’s where human will and ingenuity come in.
The existence of each one of us is also part of the cosmic plan. All who are alive during these crucial years bring to the table a unique experience, an inimitable creative intelligence, and the ability to perform a crucial role in this world moment. When we tap into these resources, keeping our eyes and hearts open, we know what to do.
Consciousness-seekers have learned that the best way to solve our individual problems is to tap into our inner resources, while staying alert to what’s happening around us. This is also how to solve society’s problems. When we follow the lead of our essential beings – when we live through the center of our charts – we know instinctively how to respond as the diseased old order cracks around us, as it should, as it must.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
The corporate media tried to ignore the Occupy Wall Street movement. Lord knows it tried.  Over the past three weeks, as protests filled the streets of New York and started springing up in cities all over the country, the TV news at first played blind, deaf and dumb.
They tried to distract the public with the usual meaningless faux-controversies. But the Equinoctial transits were so powerful that even these non-issues came with subtexts that were inadvertently on-the-mark. Consider the pertinence of Rosanne Barr’s “tasteless” behead-the-rich joke.
Even the hoopla about Obama backing a failed solar energy firm fell right into step with OWS’s message. As many pointed out, when you compare the amount of taxpayer money that went into bailing out companies like AIG, the amount lost to Solyndra is infinitesimal.
When OWS became too big to ignore, the media pundits reacted, en masse, with a resounding “But it’s not clear what they want” (a non-response, patterned after Sigmund Freud’s notorious “But what do women want?” Both questions reveal nothing about the spoken-about, and everything about the unconsciousness of the speaker.) “They’re protesting about so many things,” fretted the journalists.
Why, yes, we are.
As astrologers had foreseen, all the various manifestations of the key transit of our era, the square between Uranus and Pluto, have leaped, flaming, into the American public discussion. There is an understanding among the new activists (Uranus in Aries) that the world’s richest 1% (Pluto in Capricorn) use more than one mechanism to keep themselves in power.
One of them is the war machine. The march last night down the main drag in San Francisco marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan; but the chants and placards drew a link between the war and myriad other injustices afflicting human beings everywhere. “Money for jobs and education; not for war and occupation”. “Tax their a$$ets.” “It is a class war.”
Each of the battle cries illustrates the same essential issue: the conflict between the interests of ordinary people (Uranus) and the interests of a tiny elite that controls global operations (Pluto) through money, munitions and media.
The march in San Francisco made this point through the route it took. We marched from the Federal Building, headquarters of a government that spends $3 billion every day for war and surveillance, up to a luxury hotel where service workers were picketing for a living wage. We continued down to the bay, where Occupy SF has been encamped — in front of the Federal Reserve building. When the march reached the encampment, from the joyous whoop that arose you’d have thought the thirteen lost tribes had reunited on Market Street.
Poor, beleaguered Obama. No doubt realizing that a failure to exploit this latest American drama would win him the biggest booby prize in his four-year collection, he tried to strike the right tone in his statement about the OWS. The “American people feel frustrated,” he said, “[because] Wall Street doesn’t always follow the rules.”
“Doesn’t always follow the rules“??
The truth is that whatever he said would have come off as lame. It isn’t possible to transform a plutocracy while being its figurehead. No matter how much more intelligent and humane this president may be than his predecessor, Obama embodies a system in which “following the rules” apparently means rewarding the very swindlers whose deregulation of the financial industry caused it to implode, and assassinating the evil-guy-of-the-week with goon squads and targeted drone strikes.
The Occupy Wall Street phenomenon sprang into life on September 17, 2011, when Mars, patron of warriors both righteous and unrighteous, was opposing Pluto (powers-that-be) in the chart of the USA (see Mary Plumb’s detailed analysis). This stunning chart says it all. Any entity born under this symbolism would be a blow to the jugular of the US power structure.
But Wall Street itself is a symbol; and by putting it at the center of their crusade, the movement is transcending the American narrative. It is transcending the ugly infighting of national politics. It is going all the way, addressing the skewed state of power in the postmillennial world. The Longest Arm of the Cross, which will peak seven times between now and 2016, presides everywhere on Earth under a shared sky.
Under the waxing Moon, the energy of last night’s march was nothing short of joyous. A sense of vitality filled the air; vitality and relief. At last, the crowd seemed to say, our benumbed country is shaking itself awake.
It was a great reminder that being awake is more fun than anything.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
On this tenth anniversary of you-know-what, I don’t want to write about 9/11. I’ve written elsewhere about the implausibility of Washington’s story about what happened that day, as have many other astrologers (see especially the blogs of Eric Francis), and the explosive transits under which it happened (see Rick Tarnas’ monograph). It was the first Big Lie of the 21st century, and has amassed so much refutation that a cultural movement arose to hold it.
What I want to look at is the nationalistic energy that dominates the public conversation every September since 2001, the emotive form of which is a strangely compulsive patriotism.
There was a lot of verbal tribute being paid today about those who died in New York ten years ago. Even the comics in the Sunday paper gave it a mention. Some strips featured the characters taking off their hats; some showed family members embracing each other.
I appreciate the solemnity in the air. It’s a rare thing to witness America slowing down and taking off its collective hat, in a mass ritual rooted in unselfishness. It’s something to savor. You can sense people making the effort to recapture that brief, transcendent moment a decade ago, when a magic blend of grief and shock forced the US populace into its collective heart. Our tormented, secular society was provided with an opportunity to reach something like spiritual communion.
As an astrologer I credit the importance of a person living in a certain place. Like all other points of karma, the fact that we identify with one nation and not another is anything but random. But where the 9/11 mourners lose me is the definitive distinction they seem to draw between the tragic significance of their own countrymen dying and that of people in other countries dying. I hear about the three thousand Americans killed in New York that day and I think: Far more than three thousand civilians have been killed in Iraq. And in Afghanistan, by Pentagon drones; right now, this week. And I think: There is a famine spreading through Somalia that is killing a hundred children a day.
But experience tells me that pointing this out is all but universally unwelcome, especially around September 11th. For understandable reasons. It is always grotesque to compare one atrocity with another. It is unseemly to respond with anything other than respect to people who are in the throes of genuine grief, as so many Americans are in this month of remembrance.
The founding fathers are mentioned a lot these days. Their ghosts seem to loom over this anniversary. My neighbor in the Tea Party and I interpret their ideas quite differently, but we both see these 18th-century gentlemen as being central to any discussion of American patriotism.
When I read the political writings of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, I am amazed, every time, by the prophetic quality of their vision. They could not have imagined body scanners at modern airports, or the prospect of having their data mined by Facebook. But they could and did imagine the general tendency of governments to use fear to curtail a citizen’s freedoms, and they didn’t like that at all. Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine clearly foresaw the danger it would pose to a democratic republic if citizens were forbidden to criticize their leaders. They passionately denounced the practice of one citizen calling another a traitor for questioning official pronouncements.
Among us today are the postmillennial equivalents of these bold gents: Dr Judy Wood, for example, and the members of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
With profound respect for the importance of this milestone in American history, I too salute those souls who incarnated into this land mass with me, during this critical era — for these first decades of this century are the moment of truth for America – and who died ten years ago under mysterious circumstances. And I take my hat off to those patriots who show up for the task of uncovering what really happened.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Pluto is slowing down for its station opposed to the midpoint of the US Venus and Jupiter, and  the rot at the core of the American system is blossoming in the summer heat. The nation’s values (Venus) are being stripped raw. A twisted morality (Jupiter) is being exposed.
As individuals, we can’t afford to lose our minds amidst the madness, nor lose sight of our own moral compass. To stay engaged yet sane and humane, we must observe collective psychopathy while keeping a distance from it. One way to do this is to see current events as myths being played out (discussed in detail in my latest lecture).
Art mirrors life, and life mirrors art. Watching our world happen as if it were a story being told, we learn from the symbols couched in events; just as we do when we take in the truths of a parable or legend. In the news headlines, we find themes from great works of fiction; such as Lewis Carroll’s enduring parody Through the Looking Glass, written 130 years ago without ever going out of print.
Political cartoonists have made hay out of the fact that the current Tea Party movement bears the same name as the psychotic shindig in Wonderland. As America’s cultural landscape gets more and more grotesque, more and more parallels are appearing between Carroll’s fictional characters and our own real-time crackpots.
We’ve got candidates like Mitt Romney, whose changes of position mirror the way the Mad Hatter and the March Hare arbitrarily jump up and switch places around the tea table. We’ve got Fox News bullies verbally abusing their opponents in the same way the Hatter insults Alice with over-“personal remarks”. We’ve got empty-headed blowhards like Rick Perry, whose challenges to Obama mirror the Hatter’s unanswerable riddles — to which he does not have an answer himself. We’ve got demagogues like Sarah Palin who, when challenged, can only stonewall with mean-spirited sarcasm; just as the Hatter mocks Alice when she asks him a commonsense question.
In the story, you will recall, this behavior eventually drove Alice away. Will the American public, too, finally get sick of the insanity, and get up and leave the table?
A first step in doing so would be refusing to buy into the jerry-rigged duopoly that drives American politics. All Americans know, on some level of consciousness, that no social change can come of the farcically hyped-up contests between the two major parties, both choreographed by the same cabals. It is understood that the system is set up to silence any contenders outside of a few hand-picked Tweedledums and Tweedledees.
During a recent debate about the country’s tailspin into financial chaos, it was interesting to see outsider Ron Paul play the role of Alice. He was the only speaker who mentioned military spending, and he was met with eye-rolling dismissal by the other Republicans. They actually smirked when he proposed reconsidering the wisdom of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – which a new study says could end up costing $4.4 trillion.
Let’s write that in numerals: $4,400,000,000,000.
When Mars slammed into the Cardinal Cross and ignited the US chart in early August, Democrats and Republicans approved their much-touted “compromise” which, while cutting services for the unemployed, the poor, the elderly and schoolchildren, leaves tax breaks for the very wealthy intact and the war budget untouched.
The USA’s penchant for stupefyingly selfish leaders and fatally ignorant citizens will only get more absurd as the Uranus-Pluto square plays itself out. During its peak years (2012-2016), the corruptions of America’s political and financial institutions will be laid bare for all to see. It’s essential that we avoid outrage fatigue; anger and incredulity can take us only so far. It’s time to ground ourselves in the larger meaning of cultural breakdown.
Sky watchers achieve this perspective by isolating the cosmic lessons encoded in astrological archetypes. Another way is to track what’s happening through the lens of apposite fiction and myth.
We may find it not only appropriate, but healing, to respond with a dark Carrollian laugh to these latest incarnations of Wonderland lunatics.
Monday, July 18, 2011
I’m feeling ambivalent about irony. Certainly I’m grateful to it for providing me  with some of the best laughs I get these days; mostly from British humorists, who are masters of the form. And ironic prose is often challengingly amusing, offering a showcase for a kind of chilly cleverness.
It must say something about our society that the use of irony has become so all-pervasive. Why do we rely on it so much in writing? Why do we frame so much of what we say with finger quotes?
It strikes me that irony is essentially a self-protective mechanism, disguised as a stylish gesture. It works by holding its cards close to the vest. When we’re being ironic, we allude to our point instead of throwing all of our weight behind it. We make a show of holding back our sincerity. Irony makes no claims to opening the heart, in either the speaker or the listener.
I think we often resort to irony out of frustration. I know that when I hear about, say, Obama’s cave-in on drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, or about working class reactionaries voting for tax breaks for the rich, I can feel the exasperation rising, forming itself into a scathing remark like a stalagmite of the soul. What would be the alternative to coming out with an inverted, bitter jibe? In this case it would mean confronting, head on, a momentary feeling of anguish. I think I make an unconscious decision that that would be too painful.
David Foster Wallace said irony was built on despair.
Adolescents are notorious for irony; which I think must be related to the fact that they haven’t yet formed a solid ego structure, and tend to care a great deal about being seen as cool. Astrologically speaking, Scorpio is the ironist of the zodiac. But because we understand the nature of water, we know that the sarcastic barbs for which this sign is notorious have their source in emotional vulnerability.
It’s remarkable, by contrast, how un-ironic writers from earlier epochs were. Many of the Victorian thinkers, even the sober, philosophical ones, come across now as eye-rollingly naïve. A good example is Charles Dickens, who condemned the injustices of his time in prose that strikes our modern tastes as unbearably sentimental. But there is one thing about his un-ironic tone, with its unabashed outrage, its florid idealism (he had an Aquarius Sun and a Sagittarius Moon conjunct Neptune, for heaven’s sake) that you can’t argue with: it passes the test of time. Irony is less able to make this claim.
We don’t have to delve back into history to find writing free of irony. Every now and again we find intelligent modern thinkers who lay bare their hearts without irony’s brittle armor; but they are rare. If we were to make a distinction between the smart and the wise – putting spiritual teachers like the Dalai Lama and Eckert Tolle in the second category — I think we’d find that the latter group use irony very infrequently, and then only with the gentlest touch imaginable. Most of the points these speakers make are put forth boldly and forthrightly. They tend to make their assertions simply, without a bunch of ornate qualifications, as acts of faith. They dare to condemn what needs to be condemned without putting their tongue in their cheek and without pulling any punches.
When, for example, Martin Luther King spoke out against “the madness of militarism,” he was making use of many skills, a poetic command of language and a deft public relations savvy among them. But he didn’t need irony to come up with a consummate catchphrase that rings in our ears fifty years later.
The Neptune in Pisces years (2011-25) are about feeling everything, even those feelings we are afraid of because we have labeled them as painful; though that is a problem born of our expectation. As we enter into this long Neptunian exercise, questioning our emotional conventions would be a good idea; because I don’t think we can feel fully and deeply within the censorship of self-insulating mechanisms like irony.
Daring to suspend irony would mean reaching into our hearts and feeling everything. This will certainly be humbling, which is the Neptunian lesson.
Maybe humble will become the new cool.
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Jessica Murray
ASTROLOGER ~ AUTHOR
Astrologer, writer and cultural commentator Jessica Murray brings to light the spiritual underpinnings that shape both the personal and collective experience of our time.
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