Beyond Irony
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? And why do we frame so much of what we say with finger quotes?
Jul 2011
Spill it? Clean it up
It always struck me as so quintessentially American, that Pottery Barn metaphor that Colin Powell and Thomas Friedman chose to refer to Iraq: “You break it, you own it”. I wonder whether a public speaker elsewhere in the world would have made this same point by invoking a less explicitly commercial image. Such as, say, a mother saying to her child,
Leaping Through the Portal
As the solar Eclipse of July 1st nips at our heels, Greece is in flames. The cradle of Western civilization is exploding with the cardinal Cross.
Glimpsed sneaking away from the mayhem: none other than Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs, who apparently helped Greece to mask its debt crisis with the same slimy credit-swapping tricks that trashed the world economy three years ago. I swear, the snarkiest ironist could not have made this up. (I’m obliged to reader Preston for turning me on to an excellent article by Michael Hudson on the European crisis, epitomized right now by Greece but of worldwide relevance.)
Eclipses and Sanity
Eclipse season began with the New Moon of June first.
This month’s Skywatch discusses the series of squares taking place from Neptune in Pisces, the Great Dissembler. I thought of this ingress last weekend when I heard about the yogi Swami Ramdev, whose protest against corruption in government took a Neptunian turn. Accosted by the police during his hunger strike, the yogi fled into the crowd disguised as an old woman, covering his black beard with a white shawl.
Jun 2011
When Everything We Know is Wrong
Here it is, the Murravian Mantra: Only by living through our charts can we understand the world, and our place in it.
Moral Ambiguity
I do not have the stars-and-stripes flapping in the breeze this Spring evening. I don’t have my “We’re Number One” teeshirt on. I’m not giddy with jubilation about my country shooting Osama bin Laden in the face.
President Obama claims that “justice was done;” seeming to gloss over the associations the word justice has with charges, public trials, evidence and so on. Does it matter, if we flout international laws by sending killers to off people on foreign soil?
May 2011
Spiritual Sound Bites
From now until 2025, the world will be treading the waters of Neptune-in-Pisces. On April 4th Neptune glided into the sign of the oceans, where Chiron had been waiting for it. That very week, Japan dumped 15,000 gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.
Recall that a year ago last April, BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig blew up in the Gulf on the very day of Chiron’s last entry into Pisces. Thus has the theme of wounded waters announced itself as a key teaching of the Cardinal Cross period.
Personality Politix
It’s that time again. Soon the American airwaves will be bristling with round-the-clock coverage of the 2012 campaigns.
Ambitious candidates are getting ready to hit the ground running, with their staffs of strategists, chauffeurs and stylists. TV executives and advertisers are licking their chops at the guaranteed spike in viewership, as they prepare to spend a year and a half convincing the public that nothing exists in this big, wide, troubled world outside of the American presidential election.
Apr 2011
The Quake Within
It happened on the very day Uranus (shocks, shattering) moved into Aries. On March 11th, the tectonic plates under the Pacific Ocean buckled and northeastern Japan was devastated by the biggest quake-tsunami in its recorded history. At this writing the peril of nuclear reactor meltdown looms as the most far-reaching of the quake’s attendant dangers.
Death Metal Flying
The confetti had barely been swept up in town squares all over the world after the triumph in Egypt. The American public was distracted elsewhere, trying to find a job, or keep a job. And suddenly we were in another war.
Word was buzzing around the blogosphere that a post-March 11th natural disaster was likely