“’My country, right or wrong’ is a thing that no true patriot would think of saying… It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”
— G. K. Chesterton

This month the Saturn-Uranus opposition officially goes into orb. After the Equinox (9/22 8:46 am PDT) the transit’s impact on humanity will become stronger and stronger, and its worldly parallels more and more obvious. So will its impact on the metabolic, mental and emotional bodies of individuals. This is the most important mundane transit of the rest of the calendar year, and our goal should be to mine it for understanding.

Saturn governs social structures as well as personal ones. It is associated with the bourgeois mindset, relative to whatever culture we’re looking at. Class-wise, it encompasses the values of neither the very high nor the very low; neither the extreme Left nor Right. It is the planet of the status quo, whose premier vices, as Adam Gopnick reminds us, are hypocrisy and homogenization.¹

But Saturn is now staring down the barrel of Uranus, the planet of revolution.

Saturn-Uranus in historical context

Though the human desire for stasis leads us to characterize disruptive historical periods (such as this one) as flukish and dangerous, the symbolism of astrology tells us otherwise. We are looking at a cyclic phenomenon no weirder and no less predictable than the monthly Full Moon. Just a bit more infrequent, and a tad more intense.

When Uranus and Saturn opposed in the 1920s all hell broke loose in a different way, as Europe staggered to its feet from World War I and the American social fabric was rent by giddy economic and sexual upheaval.

The time after that, the Saturn-Uranus cycle reached opposition in the mid-sixties – a period that changed the world with sex, drugs, and rock & roll. What will the current iteration of this transit bring? We know only one thing for certain: its purpose is to destabilize the cherished complacency of the Normal.

The men who would be king

In the USA the transit will play out during the presidential campaign, the election itself and its immediate aftermath. Astrologers of a Jungian persuasion will be watching the candidates mutate from ordinary human beings into mythic figures, a perspective that is very helpful if one wants to avoid getting snookered into the cults of personality encouraged — and to a large extent, engendered — by the American media.

In the mystical view, personages rise to this degree of public prominence only because they embody certain energies that the collective needs to see acted out. At this point Obama and McCain have ceased to be mere human beings; they are mile-high collective projections, spawned by the mass mind. They are our demi-gods, fashioned in our image. From them Americans can learn much about ourselves as a group.

As they must do to stay in business, the two ruling political parties in the USA have fashioned favorite sons – one geriatric and paternal, one charming and youthful — who are both tucking themselves safely within the boundaries of Saturnian guidelines. If we were to watch the big election show from a systemic point of view rather than allowing the media to frame the narrative for us, we would see very clearly the archetypes at play. This could keep us grounded and lucid when the Saturn-Uranus opposition comes to fullness.

In what ways do these gentlemen both represent Saturn?

Duopoly

The Democratic and Republican Parties constitute a duopoly, designed to bolster the interests of the agencies that fund them. Each of their leaders has made it clear that they fully intend to maintain the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, eagerly (McCain) or reluctantly (Obama) attack Iran, and — may the Goddess preserve us — clamber up on the latest bandwagon to revive the Cold War with Russia⁴. Both parties are righteously intent upon funding the horror in Israel-occupied Palestine. Indeed, both are committed to spending $600 billion each year so that the Pentagon can maintain its 700 military bases in 130 countries all over the world.

Neither candidate is saying a peep about America’s multi-trillion-dollar debt nor the fatal weakness of the dollar. Neither dares address the role of insurance companies in the disaster that is American healthcare. Neither will touch the supremacy of corporate power that is the cornerstone of Ralph Nader’s argument for change; neither sees the necessity to submit the current administration to the rule of law as Dennis Kucinich is doing; neither challenges the official story of 9/11 as has Green candidate Cynthia McKinney.

Bush-Redux vs. Bush-Lite

McCain was for many years the premier father figure on the political landscape. Before he was running for president he was widely revered for his perceived integrity, getting into shouting matches with Dick Cheney over the issue of torture,² a subject with which he was highly respected for being all-too-closely familiar. Obama was a progressive darling in those heady days before he was the nominee-presumptive. Since then, the Senator’s increasingly whole-hearted embrace of the fundamentally irrational “war on terror” (most egregiously, his plan to pour more blood and money into the hellish bog of  Afghanistan, where casualty rates have surpassed Iraq’s) has him out-Saturning McCain; the young king usurping the old. The American public now faces a contest between Bush-Redux and Bush-Lite.

Saturn governs tradition and the past verities that shore it up. Obama’s Saturnization process has involved choosing as his advisor Cold War architect Zbigniew Brzezinski from the Carter years³. He has hinted that he will retain Bush’s choice for Defense Secretary, Robert Gates. He has been repeating the same simplistic non-analysis of the Soviet-Georgia conflict that the White House has been churning out. He has, in short, become the representative of only as much “change” as mainstream America can tolerate.

But the planets do not fall for rhetoric and charm, and Uranus knows a bourgeois when it sees one. We can expect lightning bolts to take aim at more than one target over the next few months.

Systemic decay

In the world of organic systems, where there is systemic decay one does not expect solutions to arise from within the system itself. As common-sensible as this idea seems, somehow it is a little harder to fathom when the subject is our own governmental, financial and civic institutions; our attachment to which prevents us from copping a perspective. But universal forces don’t care how attached we are. The laws of stasis-maintenance (Saturn), breakthrough (Uranus) and renewal (Pluto) still apply.

It is Uranus that governs change; a word now being as ubiquitously and meaninglessly touted in American discourse as the word democracy was just before the invasion of Iraq. But true Uranian change is the stuff of revolutions: whether bloody or bloodless, whether military or cultural, these cannot derive from the institutions already in place. They are by definition threatening to the powers-that-be.

When thinking about the opposition building above, we need to remember that Uranus is more powerful than Saturn. In any contest between them, Uranus will win. And if Uranian change does not and cannot come from the status quo, where does it come from? As history unerringly reminds us, it comes from The People themselves.

To be continued next month.

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Notes:

1 The New Yorker, July 7 and 14, 2008

2 According to one of his advisers, McCain once said that negotiating about torture with Cheney “was like negotiating bank reform with Bonnie and Clyde.”

3 This was the team that covertly armed Afghan mujahedeen — effectively inventing the Taliban  — six months before the Soviets invaded; a fact that the Democratic White House baldly denied.

4 A coveted oil route lies behind this latest misadventure, a fact anyone could guess unless they’d  been hiding under a rock in regards to American foreign policy for the past 15 years (or listening to the news on TV, which amounts to the same thing). Georgia is a major oil transit point for all of Central Asia. The noble victim in Washington’s story, President Saakashvili, is the fellow who sent 2,000 of his country’s young men to help Uncle Sam occupy Iraq. Generously armed by the Pentagon, whose Special Forces, along with Israeli advisers and mercenary contractors, direct the Georgian military, Saakashvili held joint exercises with the US Army and Marines this past July, a detail strangely omitted from the official narrative. While the US media spins the episode as an unprovoked attack by the big bad Russian Bear, little mention is made of the episode that called the tanks in: Georgia’s earlier invasion of the tiny autonomous region of South Ossetia, in which civilians and Russian peacekeeping troops were killed; an invasion that was undoubtedly greenlighted by Washington. Meanwhile the Cheney team has been busy pushing to get Georgia into NATO,* and placing anti-Russian missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic in flagrant disregard of the wishes and interests of the overwhelming majority of those populaces.

* Now would be a good time for Americans to remember that NATO was established as an anti-USSR military alliance aimed at preventing popular uprisings in the colonial powers of Europe weakened by World War II. Then, as now, from an archetypal point of view the much-decried ruthlessness of the Kremlin mirrors nose-to-nose that of Washington. The Russian army’s incursions into sovereign nations echo those of the Pentagon; the KGB (where Putin got his training) mirrors the CIA (whose modern face was established by Bush Sr).