Sound and Fury, Part Two
Dr Decay
Pluto is about death and putrefaction. If you’re looking for a breath of fresh air, it’s probably not the first planet you think of.
But I would argue that it is the most refreshing of all cycles to track right now, because it forces us to take the long view.
The News
Otherwise, we’re stuck in the idiocy of the corporate media, freaking out like passengers in a broken elevator. Trapped within the media echo chamber, our emotional reactivity is continuously triggered, our common sense drowned out, our vision walled in. There’s no sense of the meaning of what’s going on.
By contrast, the point of view of the distant planets gives us a glimpse of the overall significance of this historical moment.
Think of Pluto as Dr Decay. The rotting process is part of the healing cycle: when a dead branch falls off a tree, the tree is healthier for it.
Capricorn, the sign Pluto is in, governs institutions that make a society cohere: governments, accepted mores, journalistic standards. In this sign, Dr Decay presides over the breakdown of official narratives.
Deeply systemic
We’ve got a daddy complex about the presidency. We always turn to presidential elections for examples. But that’s not where the action is. — Mark Lilla
The current crisis of American polity is not about personalities or campaigns or which party is winning. The problem is far more deeply rooted than that. It is systemic.
Astrology saw it coming, long before the rise to high office of Trump and his merry band of nut jobs (1). 
The transits made it clear that longstanding public institutions had to crumble.
Same sky, same meaning
In our last blog we looked at the way planetary symbolism reveals the links between phenomena that we’d otherwise consider totally opposite in meaning.
Such as the two elections America just had.
It’s an axiom of astrology that events which happen under the same transit share the same thematic meaning. Both the Obama and Trump presidencies took place under Pluto in Capricorn, and both blew the world’s mind.
Both overthrew timeworn political conventions. We may have applauded the one and abhorred the other, but the like/ dislike polarity (a construct of Venus) is, in this context, beside the point. (2)
If we momentarily set aside our affinities and antipathies, new insights become possible.
It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, ‘If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.’ — Ta Nehisi Coates
Noxious war
When we’re not enmeshed within them, current media conventions reveal themselves in all their weird reductionism.
Such as the fact that the very word “political” in US parlance is presumed to refer to nothing more than “Democrats vs. Republicans.”
Not an exploration of ideas, not a genuine debate about policies, just the corrupt antics of two big-money cartels. A noxious war of egos.
This convention serves to obscure the fundamental fact of American life: that power here is structured not along a lateral spectrum but a vertical one. Not left-vs.-right, but top-vs.-bottom.
Both sides of the aisle
Trump’s presidency is so unhinged and uniquely threatening, it’s become increasingly difficult to separate between what is a Trump phenomenon and what corrosion existed before his time, but paved the way for him. — Charlie May
Just as Trump didn’t invent racism — he just “liberated [the establishment] from the pretense of antiracist civility” (Coates) — Trump didn’t invent governmental corruption. He just brought it out into the open (see this essay by Masha Gessen).
Pluto (corruption) doesn’t care which wing of the establishment (Capricorn) gets exposed, as we saw when the Bernie Sanders campaign was shafted by the inner circle of his own party.
But the blue-against-red narrative, hyped to giddy extremes under Trump, disguises the systemic nature of what’s going on. It masks the fact that the USA is not functioning as a democracy but as a duopoly.
Tellingly, Washington lobbyists are by no means so myopic. They know it’s about greasing the palms of politicians from both sides of the aisle.
Drain the swamp? He bottled it and sold it as Dr Trump’s miracle healing elixir. — Seth Meyers
That said, it’s no accident that the Republican party is the one Dr Decay has chosen to take the lead 
right now. Appealing to voter bigotry, nationalism and paranoia has been a GOP specialty for the past fifty years.
And now, they have Fox News and cable.
Trump & Nixon
A lot of comparisons have been drawn lately between Trump and Richard Nixon, the only other president in recent memory this pathologically unprincipled. But in one key way, the comparison between these two sultans of slime breaks down.
Today’s cultural climate is fraught with an extreme of polarization that was unknown in the days of Watergate.
There were three TV stations in 1973. No internet, no Breitbart, no InfoWars. All Americans saw the same news. 
Everybody was watching Walter Cronkite, and, more or less universally, believing what he said.
Now, pro-Trump and anti-Trump camps exist in two separate universes. It’s not merely a matter of differing opinions. It’s a mutual condemnation of the facts underlying each other’s opinions.
Liberals who remain incredulous that Trump’s party refuses to condemn him, no matter how flagrant his perfidy, are failing to take into account what these cynical politicians know very well: that their base is tuned into Fox. (And of course, so is Trump: the only senile old man in the world who’s actually correct that the TV is talking to him.) (3)
Truth and truthers
Republican office-holders know their constituency. They know that when Fox says millions of illegals voted fraudulently to win Hillary the popular vote, Fox fans believe it. These viewers believe that Sandy Hook was staged w/ child actors. They believe in pizzagate.
This lack of even a rough agreement among the populace about evidentiary data is the biggest wrecking ball in Pluto’s arsenal, striking the definitive blow to cultural cohesion.
The Trump mind
At this point in our national experiment with toddlerocracy, our Chucklehead-in-Chief – who constitutes, in his own mind, a government of one (4) — has simplified all national discussion to the level of his own crudely dualistic mind (Gemini in arrested development).
He sees all matters, great and small, as either Pro-Trump or Anti-Trump; himself as either victorious or victimized; others as either winner or losers.
We would expect this of a classic narcissist. And as the world has seen over the past year and a half, this has not changed. His worldview has not developed. Superficially unpredictable, he is actually banally predictable, because he does not grow.
The danger for the rest of us is that his stunted mentality has become normalized. A toxic strain of 
reductionistic thinking now has the authority of the White House behind it. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls this the malignant normality syndrome.
It should give us pause that the media, following the binary bait, is portraying the Russia probe as a Trump-vs-the Democrats issue.
This cajoles the public into forgetting that Uncle Sam, under administrations from both parties, has itself meddled – incessently, shamelessly and violently – in the elections of sovereign states all over the world.
Trump vs. the World
Trump-centrism has made us lose sight of what our country is up to while we waste our time fuming about made-up issues like “Spygate”.
He bends the space-time continuum so as to stuff in more news than a week can typically contain. — John Oliver
Love him or hate him, most of us now see the whole of American foreign policy as a Trump-vs-the-world scenario. This only serves to exacerbate public ignorance about the historical record, which might more accurately be called Uncle Sam-vs.-the-world.
It distracts responsible citizens from thinking about the fatal stupidity of two decades’ worth of Uncle Sam’s inconclusive wars in collapsed states.
It blinds us to the unholy mess set in motion by Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Indeed, dear old Dubya, re-branded as a harmless hobbyist, is now mostly famous for being No Longer the Worst President.
The All-Trump-All-the-Time approach to public discourse has removed
pretty much all public curiosity about the civilians being killed by Pentagon drone strikes.
It has kicked out of the headlines the horror of Syria, the war crimes in Afghanistan, the catastrophic refugee crisis. It has pre-empted public outrage about the thousands of children killed by U.S.-made weapons in Yemen.
Accepting Pluto
There’s only one way to maintain our sanity amidst the disintegration of external systems, and that is to stay grounded in our internal systems. This means detaching while staying aware.
We bear open-hearted witness to the chaos swirling inside and outside of ourselves. From this vantage point, we negotiate our responses to it.
Only from the center of our charts can we accept the greater logic of Pluto, whose teachings lead us to understand, and not just in an intellectual way, why obsolete collective constructs need to break down.
Its teachings lead us to accept the necessity of mess and decay, a.k.a. Death.
Notes
1) Another fine insult from Sam Bee.
2) Obviously, it isn’t beside the point in a political or moral context. We need the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn to inspire us to think, to care, to evaluate, to know how to vote. But personal responses to world events fall outside – or too far inside — of Pluto’s purview.
3) Bee, op cit.
4) Trump is like a walking parody of an autocrat. Dismissing the disastrous vacancies at the State Department, he said, “I’m the only one that matters.” He has claimed the right to pardon himself from prosecution in the Russia probe. “He has no ideology except self-interest. He doesn’t play politics; he plays the angles” (Jeffrey Toobin).