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Pluto and the Media
by Jessica Murray
February 2005
Kill your television
Mercury
opposes Pluto in the chart of the
USA. A handful of Americans neatly expresses this aspect with the bumper-sticker
distress call "Kill (Pluto) your television (Mercury)".
This article will look at what the
rest of the country does with it.
Invisible power
To understand the fraught topic of American
power metaphysically, we must first strip it of its connotations. Interpreting
a chart is like painting a still life: if we want to truly observe the
object, we start by forgetting what we think we know about it.
What would most astrologers, using straight-out-of-the-textbook
astrology, make of a Mercury-Pluto opposition, if they found it in any
group chart? They would probably say that the group's information
system may be undermined by an
underground power source.
The system in question is the American
mass media, a phenomenon whose immense reach extends well beyond this country
into popular culture throughout the modern world -- from Shanghai street
vendors hawking knock-offs of J-Lo perfume to Nigerian gangsters using
street language inspired by Eminem CDs.
And what is the underground power source?
Who controls the media, how they do so, and what are the implications of
this control?
Intellectual property cartel
One doesn't have to be an astrologer
to know that America is undergoing an unprecedented crisis of self-revelation,
a crisis reflected by the transit of Pluto over the USA Ascendant in 2001.
One of the cats that has come tumbling out of the bag during this period
is the truth about media hegemony, bias and corruption, which has been
dutifully ousted in a flurry of bestsellers (Weapons of Mass Deception)
and films (Outfoxed) exposing the news industry as an intellectual
property cartel.
But we have seen that myths grow up
around Pluto, keeping it strangely isolated in the chart. These serve to
protect the planet, perversely, from scrutiny and integration. Collective
stories surround America's Pluto just as personal stories surround an individual's
Pluto. Obsolete notions and fantasies about free speech (Mercury) in a
plutocratic economy (Pluto in the second house)
abound in our national ethos.
One of these myths is that the availability
of five hundred television channels means freer choice and higher quality
programming -- a notion that falls away when we consider the ramifications
of the same four corporations owning everything from TV satellites to billboards.
As industry watchers know, these mega-companies do not really compete with
each other. Like a mafia family (also ruled by Pluto), they form a cartel
that operates through a carefully controlled arrangement: Fox movies have
to be sold to HBO, Warner cable has to take Fox because they're the one
with sports teams, and so on; all of which keeps the power locked in, and
independent producers shut out.
Secrets hidden in plain sight
Pluto governs secrets hidden in plain
sight. Accordingly, evidence of what the American media has become is often
openly flaunted, while our grade-school-textbook notions about free speech
remain bizarrely unchanged. Take the example of political reactionary and
media mogul Rupert Murdoch. He is now a household name; but though the
public knows who he is, they do not seem to know what he
is. His monopolistic holdings are more likely to be mentioned in popular
magazines in the gushing tones of a personal-success story than they are
to be condemned.
It is hardly classified information
that the media has become a corporate commodity with an entrenched lobby
in Washington, right up there with Big Oil and Big Pharma. Cheerfully reported
in the news as if it were the most natural thing in the world is the fact
that media goliath Clear Channel poured millions of dollars into Bush's
reelection campaign. Accepted as common knowledge
is the fact that Colin Powell's son was allowed to run the supposedly apolitical
Federal Communications Commission -- that august body set up to protect
the airwaves, which were once seen as belonging to the common weal every
bit as much as the oxygen we breathe.
And in case we children of the 60s had
not yet noticed the writing on the wall, it was announced a couple of years
ago that even Bill Graham Presents is now owned by the conglomerate
responsible for the kind of radio and television broadcasting that would
make ol' Bill spin in his grave.
Connecting the dots
Wherever it is placed, Pluto points
to a highly charged situation that nobody wants to name. The aspect in
question suggests fear of discovery of the truth (Pluto) even when
discussing known facts (Mercury).
It is in keeping with Pluto's operation
that even where dots exist, they are not connected. Connecting
them would be too disturbing. One of those features of modern life that
seems to be shrouded in mass denial is the notion that the free press we
all learned about in 5th grade -- one of the most frequently touted sacred
cows of American democracy -- is in fact a mega-business in bed with the
government.
Over the course of G.W.Bush's first
term, Big Media tried to gut the last few FCC restrictions that have safeguarded
the media from total consolidation. This has provoked no widespread outrage,
largely because the rulings have been virtually blacked-out by mainstream
news outlets -- all of whom naturally support
the effort to kill the safeguards. At issue here is the threatened loss
of an iconic American concept: that the airwaves are public property which
cannot be bought and sold. But because the loss is already well underway,
there is almost no coverage of what is going on.
In January 2005 the proposed rule-gutting
was struck down in court, and the Bush camp, at this point not even bothering
to hide its interest in the issue, has said it will hold off on pursuing
it for the moment. This reprieve seems to be due to a small but vocal group
of free-speech advocates who rallied a grassroots protest.
It is telling that they used the world-wide
web to raise the alarm. All eyes are now on the internet as a last bastion
of the exchange of free ideas.
But the internet is not where
most of America gets its news. The information-dispensers-of-choice
in this country are overwhelmingly corporate TV and radio; and since they
exclude themselves from self-disclosure, any details of how our government
manages the industry remain the inside scoop of those folks who are web-savvy
enough to know where to find unexpurgated news on their computers, or of
those folks who read books and watch documentaries -- a tiny minority of
Americans.
With Pluto obscuring the issue in typical
don't-ask-don't-tell fashion, most of the country remains oblivious.
No escape from escapism
When they do appear, the mainstream
media's much-hyped attempts to observe itself are so unserious as to come
across as intentional red herrings. For example, the novelty of "embedded"
war reporters -- a self-parodying idea if there ever was one -- to cover
the attack on Iraq in the Spring of 2003 suggested a deliberate attempt
to steer viewers' attention away from the urgent and vital questions they
had been in the process of asking about the war.
More ghoulish entertainment than information-dispensing,
the embedded reporters gimmick was paraded before the television audience
and then lost its buzz as quickly as Peter Jennings' new hairstyle.
One-Two-Three Rule of Pluto
Pluto is about breakdown, followed by
regeneration. Identifying the rot is the first step, whether in a souring
carton of milk or in a human organization. We may get as far as raising
the glass to our lips before we smell it and ask ourselves: Do I really
want to drink this?
Acknowledging our place within the system
is the second step. I bought this milk; what am I going to do with it
now?
The third step, for those Pluto-appointed
souls whose path leads them further, is to take part in the regeneration
phase, as when we make the conscious choice to compost food that has expired.
To apply Pluto's 1-2-3 rule in the societal
realm, we first unsentimentally identify the hidden sources of power in
the system at hand. We cannot do this without going outside of the system
for perspective. Then we focus inwards, equipped with fresh vision. After
that, we work diligently, like a midwife, to tend the long, hard rebirth
that must ultimately follow.
Group charts
The theory behind group charts is that
the worldview they describe is held, on a consensual level, by those individuals
who identify as members. If our wish is to transcend the folly of the collective
in which we live, we must follow the same logic that accrues to transcending
the limitations in the individual chart: first we seek out a dispassionate
observer who can help us pinpoint our blind spots.
Looking at the world through a foreigner's
eyes every once in a while would be quite an eye-opener for Americans who
believe that the corporate news describes -- in the words of former newsman
Walter Cronkite -- the way it is. By contrast, Americans who read
international newspapers and web sites are informing themselves outside of the
Pluto-Mercury pattern. They are less likely to be in the thrall of their
country's group-think.
We would not expect viability from a
rotting organism; and we will not get the truth about the mainstream
media from the mainstream media. Putting one's credence in National
Public Radio, for instance, without looking at where they get their funding,
fails to take Plutonian logic into account; as does launching a liberal
radio station under the auspices of Clear Channel.
Tale told by an idiot
If a system of information is corrupted
to the core, we would expect it to share characteristics with other life
systems in decay. In Nature, when an organism is about to die, it may go
through a flailing disintegration, a penultimate frenzy of faux-vitality.
In the fractured format of today's popular
news programs, with their jumble of popping visuals and speed-crawling
sound bites, we can infer a similar pre-mortem hysteria. The plan seems
to be to pile on over-stimulating production techniques to keep viewers
from thinking about what they are seeing and hearing.
In content as well as form, the corporate
media's fragmented worldview comes across as a tale told by an idiot, signifying
nothing. Affecting the look-and-feel of sports programs, the nightly news
reduces all information, no matter how tragic or globally significant,
to the same level of glittering meaninglessness. Watching each week's breathless
mini-drama crowd out the one reported the week before, one cannot help
but conclude that the intention is to enable the public's amnesia and encourage
its ignorance.
When "investigative reporters" were
covering the assault on Fallujah of December 2004, for example, they tried
to rivet our attention on mock-scientific pie-graphs supposedly showing
how much of the terrorized city had fallen, day by day, to US forces. At
no point did they question why 500-lb. bombs would still be dropping on
a place that had, in their reports from the previous week, been declared
"pacified".
Skewed presentation
This lack of cohesion extends to the
print media, where story placement and frequency of mention betray the
same corruption (a media-watch study found The San Francisco Chronicle
to be twelve times more likely to report the killing of an Israeli child
than a Palestinian child). It has become commonplace to find a story of
considerable significance -- e.g. a communiqué from the Iraqi branch
of Al Qaeda, claiming to be negotiating with kidnappers to spare Red Cross
worker Margaret Hassan's life -- buried in the back pages of the paper,
while inflammatory stories alluding to the same group's brutality are placed
on the front pages.
Though critical thinkers might view
both reports with equal skepticism, at issue here is the fact that conclusions
of any value are arrived at in spite of the way news is presented,
not because of it.
Faux scandals
Inconsistencies such as these bespeak
a systemic lack of integrity, in all senses of the word. The center
cannot hold in an entity that is decomposing.
One wonders how the college journalism
departments of today negotiate the disparity between the old-school tenets
of ethics, neutrality, intelligent debate, etc. and the new realities of
rightwing radio diatribes and news-as-infotainment.
In a curious subplot, the demise of
journalistic integrity in America has been the subject of a recent spate
of mini-scandals (Pluto) involving plagiarizing reporters (Mercury), served
up with the perverse glamour of celebrity crimes. It
is almost as if we hope that by watching a B-movie about disgraced New
York Times reporter Jason Blair's isolated malfeasance, we can staunch
the deeper wound: that of a media whose all-encompassing lack of viability
is too troubling to look at.
The first casualty of war
American historians will one day name
the war in Iraq -- which coincided with Pluto's ingress into the USA's
first house -- as having set a new precedent for government control of
the news.
Despite last year's New York Times
mea culpa, in which the paper of record conceded that they might have been
just a tiny bit hasty in accepting Bush's call to war, America's news media
clearly continue to get their scripts from the White House. Any capacity
for self-correction is precluded by the fact that watchdog agencies have
become thoroughly politicized, even as political agencies are being privatized.
Facts (Mercury), buried but still
available, seem to have been superceded by a far more formidable force:
that of political power (Pluto).
Curiosity
Individuals whose charts contain the
Mercury-Pluto opposition may be possessed of an extraordinary focus of
mind that can latch onto a chosen subject like a drill. But although this
capacity can bestow an intense mental rigor, seldom does one see that free-ranging
openness that gives Mercury its reputation for loving ideas for their own
sake.
In the U.S. chart, Pluto has overpowered
Mercury, crippling its capacity for curiosity. The anti-intellectualism
for which our country has long been notorious has deepened into a dumbing-down
trajectory that is studiously aided and abetted by the business-government
alliance that rules from Washington (Pluto in the second house).
Without curiosity, we lack sufficient
mental vitality to question -- let alone respond to -- what we are being
told. What remains is numb credulity.
Saturn and Pluto
Saturn,
the planet of censorship1,
is also clearly involved. Independent reports have been emerging in our
newspapers only to disappear from its pages the next day -- as happened
after the coup in Haiti -- while Washington-authorized reports of the same
event are copiously repeated. Saturn is associated with voices being silenced
and facts being held back, giving the public less information to work with.
But Pluto's operation is more subtle:
the truth is not so much restricted, as bent and spun. The dark side of
Pluto-Mercury, whether in an unenlightened individual or an unenlightened
collective, is mind control. There may be an avalanche of information
available, but its presentation is crafted to keep people from applying
moral criteria to it, or even good old-fashioned logic.
Plutonian linguistics
Throughout modern history, propaganda
has been demonstrably effective in subverting the natural human tendency
to be repulsed by war. Propaganda is manipulation (Pluto) of the
mass mind through words and ideas (Mercury). Nowhere is it more
thoroughly evidenced than in the language used by the corporate news.
In the weeks before the bombs hit Baghdad
in March 2003, military monikers such as "Operation Iraqi Freedom"
began appearing in newspaper stories without quotation marks or qualifiers,
signaling that the government's version of the invasion was the only version
we were going to get. Throughout the war (often delicately referred to
as a "conflict"), the American media has kept up with the White House's
shifting wordplay every step of the way.
An example of Plutonian linguistics
that has received an untypical amount of critical parsing is the tailored
phrase "enemy combatant", invented to get around protections that international
law would extend to these unfortunate men and boys, were they called something
else.
Under the radar
Other official coinages are more covert.
Pluto is in its element when under the radar; and it is a well-documented
irony that propaganda is more persuasive the more unremarkable it is.
When White House strategists decreed
that non-military Iraqis should no longer be called "civilians" -- presumably
because the term came across as too sympathetic -- newspapers dropped the
word without missing a beat. Allusions to "insurgents" started to appear
with increasing frequency.
White-House surrealism also dictates
the language the press uses to refer to the various puppet regimes Paul
Bremer & company have been trying to set up in Iraq. Few questions
were raised when the media started throwing around terms like "president"
and "prime minister" to describe the dubious Mr. Allawi, a hand-picked
veteran of the CIA and British espionage, and his disgraced predecessor,
Ahmed Chalabi, immediately after the Pentagon began trying to bestow these
risible titles upon them.
It is worth remembering that the media
started to linguistically legitimize Iraq's ever-changing gaggle of collaborators
-- collectively referring to them as "the interim
government of Iraq"2 --
well before the ghastly charade at the ballot boxes in late January 05.
Calling this committee of stooges a "government" was clearly meant to sidestep
the ludicrously obvious question of whether such a thing can exist in a
country being torn apart by a bloody military occupation.
In some instances the media's manipulation
of language is apparently intended to be subliminal (Pluto at its most
Plutonian). A recent photo in the San Francisco Chronicle of a prisoner
at Guantanamo referred to him as being "caught" on such-and-such a date.
Given that this young man had been neither tried, indicted, charged nor
even accused of a crime, it would seem that the accurate word might be
"detained", or some variant thereof. But someone, somewhere, decided upon
the verb "caught" -- a word associated with escaped convicts and rodents.
Terms of debate
The damage done by the media's skewed
presentation of the war goes beyond misinformation. It has steered the
debate itself fatally off course.
At first, the debate was about whether
the occupation was necessary, legal or moral. A
surprising number of editorials came out denouncing the invasion as a mass-murdering
snow job by oil profiteers. But gradually the debate changed. During last
year's presidential campaign, it was not about whether but how
troops should be deployed in Iraq. For the past few months, the war debate
-- if that is what it could be called at all anymore -- has centered around
tactical details such as armor, provisions and numbers of soldiers.
But even these quibblings seem downright
trenchant compared to what our intrepid newsmen began busying themselves
with as 2005 began: the Grand Guignol of the Iraqi "elections". It is difficult
to imagine the degree of cynicism that must be calcifying within the spirits
of these network employees stationed in Iraq, dispatching bromides about
the
will of the Iraqi people while outside their secured hotel rooms a
full-blown military occupation explodes in free-fall.
Ignorance vs. stupidity
Since the November 04 presidential election,
all over the world thoughtful observers have been scratching their heads,
asking what could be going through the minds of the American electorate.
What answer might be proposed by our study of Pluto opposite Mercury?
As a multi-leveled archetype, Mercury
governs more than just information acquisition. It has to do with the proficiency
with which we use our minds: our intelligence, which a teacher of mine
once defined as the ability to pay attention. Unconscious
Pluto
can impair the Mercurial ability to pay attention; to take in reality.
Ignorance -- to not know enough
-- is unfortunate. But stupidity -- to buy into polluted information
out of intellectual laziness -- is dangerous.
Lies
Perhaps the most damning result of a
corrupt government is that lying loses its ability to offend and
disgrace. In America's current Plutonian crisis, the stigma (to say nothing
of the criminality) attached to presidential lying seems to have disappeared.
Propaganda is capable of making people
believe both everything and nothing at the same time, as Hannah Arendt
has observed.3 Fear-inflaming
scenarios are fabricated by Washington, instantly repeated by all the news
networks at once, and the next day refuted (remember anthrax?); but rather
than protesting against the lies, the public retreats into jadedness.
The last nail in Mercury's coffin will
be when the public stops objecting to being deceived because we hold everything
we hear to be a lie anyway.
Cynicism vs. common sense
Of the myriad social degradations of
contemporary American life, cynicism is the most insidious. Not
too long ago, cynicism was seen as a character flaw: among politicians,
it was a grievous slur. But as popular culture has forsaken any muse but
commerce, the media has lost credibility as a zone of ideas; and fewer
and fewer systems of public accounting remain to represent and support
us as ordinary citizens. People begin to feel powerless, and then they
get cynical. Cynicism is no longer merely an affectation of critics and
teenagers. It has become normative.
To be a conscious person in millennial
America, we must detach from this deadening mass experience. We
must maintain a distance from the toxic cacophony that is the mainstream
media. To do so we must apply two basic traits of a healthy Mercury: curiosity
and common sense.
Curiosity and common sense are ours
from birth. Astrology considers them to be part of our animal nature. The
essential gift of Mercury is our everyday intelligence, our instinct to
question; that voice in our head that would say, "Okay, now the Bush administration
spends 65 million in the Ukraine; turns out the CIA has been there for
some time. They say it was to insure an honest election over there. Does
this sound plausible? Is that why the CIA usually goes places? Let's think
this through. Does our government seem to worry about rigorous accuracy
here in American elections? Let's look at the track record. Have Bush's
calls for democracy in other countries resulted in self-determination in
those countries? Like, in even one of them? If I were to put money
on it, what would I bet was most likely to be true here?"
Living through our Suns
When astrologers speak of living
through one's Sun, we mean maintaining one's singular identity in the
face of overwhelming pressure to surrender the self. Once we have accepted
the idea that our soul must have had its reasons for incarnating into this
particular group, benighted though it may be, we can settle into our purpose
and apply our unique skills to the challenge. Sun-centered, we can remain
detached, yet heartily engaged -- without being negated, harmed or even
held back by the group's incapacities.
Once we're centered in the Sun in our
chart, we can meet not only the group's needs, but our own . We can now
connect personally (Venus) and tribally
(the Moon); we can connect through
right action (Mars); we can find the
will to believe in something (Jupiter).
We develop a sense of living responsibly (Saturn). Staying rooted in the
singular self (Sun), we can make sense of our nationality, assimilating
it without becoming assimilated by it.
Turning off the television would really,
really help.
Notes:
1 Saturn's
ingress into Gemini marked Bush's ingress into his first term.
2 This
confusion stems from a deeply rooted linguistic conceit whereby a country's
name is used to refer not to the citizens of that country, but to its government.
That there is a difference is something we don't usually think about, absent
a marked opposition between that citizenry and their government. The phrase
"the American people" clearly means you and me; but how about just "America"?
When disgusted international observers use that single word, "America",
do they mean Bush, or you and me?
This convention of language has profound
implications when it comes to selling the idea of war. Underlying the usage
is a mental fusion of a specific group of rulers with a historic tribe
of ordinary people, with whom we would otherwise instinctively identify
on the level of shared humanity. Exploiting this subliminal equation, Karl
Rove persuaded many Americans that because Saddam Hussein was "evil", Iraqis
as a whole deserved Shock and Awe. The deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians
would never have played in Peoria, so "the bombing of Iraq" had to be made
to seem as if it meant "the bombing of Saddam Hussein".
The media's current use of the singular
noun Iraq (e.g. "Iraq clamps down on Sunni Triangle") is pointedly meant
to refer to the current government-facsimile in Baghdad. Meanwhile the
press has been increasingly referring to Iraq's actual citizens with terminology
suggestive of criminality, outsider status and even vermin ("... fighting
in areas infested with Sadr-sympathizers").
3 The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
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