Astrologically, it wasn’t hard to see that health care was going to be the issue of the year. Consider the makeup of the Super Conjunction of 2009: Neptune (universality), Chiron (healing) and Jupiter (reform) in Aquarius (medicine). All the ingredients were there. This was the set-up long before this summer’s astonishing partisan antics enflamed the debate like a mad doctor setting his patient alight.

No one expected the behemoth reform process to be easy. But under a Mars-Saturn square the week after last month’s lunar eclipse, the situation degenerated badly, fast.

The phrase “town hall meetings” struck the first false note. As if calling these spin sessions by a quaint name would disguise the fact that they were internationally wired press conferences made up of elaborately scripted sound bites.

In any case, the Democrats were clearly unprepared for what happened when the show began. They seem to have expected a modicum of decorum, or at least rudimentary sanity. But the minute the bill’s spokesmen opened their mouths at the podium, a raucous cadre of rebutters took over the room; fevered by an ignorance so willful it came across as downright triumphant. (Can one be proud of not having the facts? This reminds me of something Michael Savage once said: “Sunnis, Shiites… I don’t ever want to know the difference”).

It is a subject of conjecture whether these good citizens whipped themselves into a frenzy of fear-driven rage, or were whipped thither by others. Certainly the whole circus exuded the rotten scent of sabotage.Whether these “protesters” were bona fide hysterics or faux-hysterics planted by the other side, the result is the same. What was billed as a series of civil public debates has turned into what feels like a group therapy session for troubled teenagers on a bad day. By now everyone has seen those cringe-inducing clips. There were threats hurled, there was weeping, there was paranoia. At one point someone in the crowd shouted “We’re all afraid of Obama”.

Misused Mars erupts as anger; Saturn all too often shows up as fear. Together they can manifest as the kind of panic-driven bullying that we associate with the phrase “the best defense is a good offense.” Sarah Palin is a mistress of this tactic.

By “misused Mars” I mean, the square manifests this way unless consciousness is present. And there did seem to be a truly breathtaking lack of consciousness in the room during these spectacles. Many dismayed observers are saying that a new low has been reached for the democratic process.

This point is corroborated by the natal chart of the USA.

Within these make-believe town halls, dissemination of information was the stated goal; but there was no informing going on. Those who have looked at the US Sibley chart will be familiar with this theme: the undermining of reasoned discourse (Mercury) by the presence of a hidden agenda (Pluto). It is a key feature of the nation’s karma, spelled out by the Mercury-Pluto opposition. The American public will not free itself from this pernicious state of affairs unless we break the hold over our collective intelligence exerted by this powerful undercurrent, which serves as the spine of the country’s chart. That means, first of all, naming the situation for what it is.

This Americans are starting to do — thanks to transits like the Mars-Saturn square, which renders the problem so blatant that a backlash against it starts to form. There are citizens who
are remembering from their schoolbooks what the founding fathers said about an informed public being the premier component of a functional democracy. There are others who are just turned off by the sheer ugliness of these proceedings. Most people don’t like to think of their tax-supported, popularly elected officials being shouted down by mobs.

The next step would be for Americans to connect the dots back to the corporate forces that create the ideas and images we identify as the news. That is, to realize that it serves the purposes of the infotainment industry to present these appalling scenarios as typical, acceptable – even entertaining. The producers of these broadcasts will tell you that displays of witless rage constitute the kind of programming people pay to watch, and they have the statistics to prove it.

Here we see brought to its predictable conclusion what happens to a Pluto in the second house (obsessive commodification) when it opposes an eight-house (corporatization) Mercury (information).

But it is predictable only in the absence of consciousness.

Mercifully, conscious individuals tend to turn up when things get really unconscious. Exemplars come along to evoke the higher expression of collective aspects like this. Rachel Maddow, for instance, seems a harbinger of a breed of young pundits who could bring clarity and civility back into the media. The fact that she has gotten so popular so quickly tells us how hungry people are to escape the idiocy that has become the norm.

Will the US telecommunications industry loosen its choke-hold enough to allow for free-flowing discourse, unpolluted by the cynical manipulations of its controlling interests?

This question should be our guide as the country makes its way through the Cardinal Cross years. Keep your eyes on the last few days of August, when Mars opposes Pluto by transit.