As I type these words, Saturn is only three degrees away from Libra. This should provide a refreshing change.

For two and a half years Saturn has been in Virgo, the sign of health and sickness. Although there were other transits that went into making health care reform the 500-pound gorilla that it has become, we can chalk up to Virgo (unconscious Virgo, that is) the obsessive parsing that has surrounded this charade of a debate. With Saturn moving into an air sign, I am looking forward to a fresh breeze of reason and rationality to waft into the American conversation.

The ingress into Libra on October 29^th will also change the tenor of the ongoing Saturn-Uranus opposition. It will shift old tensions and introduce new ones. Don’t expect the polarization to end any time soon; we’re in the Cardinal Cross years, which are all about radical new ideas challenging failed old policies. Tug-o’-wars are the order of the day. But issues will now take a Libran turn. Expect marriage equality to regain center stage. There will be a renewed emphasis on justice and law.

The USA has natal Saturn in Libra, and it is coming into its collective Saturn Return, peaking in 2011. The premises upon which this democracy is based, which most Americans vaguely consider to be eternal and flawless, will be critiqued with a harsh new scrutiny.

In America’s chart, Saturn falls in the tenth house; the one associated with the workings of government. Time to pull out the old textbooks: we’re going back to civics class.

You may have heard about the problems we’re having here in California; not just financially but in the more inscrutable arena of legislative mechanics. Under the current system, which makes no sense but is all technically legal, a few sparsely populated areas are holding the state hostage. Thanks to decades of gerrymandering and other contrivances, we’ve got a situation where great swaths of cultural wasteland, inhabited by a smattering of rural reactionaries and the odd libertarian, are determining policies that fly in the face of the intent of the vast majority of the citizenry.

On the national level, we find the same skewed situation, exemplified by the health care debate. A tiny number of loud, ill-informed extremists are wielding wildly disproportionate amounts of political power; and the media is presenting it as a healthy give-and-take between equal sides. Somewhere between the Founding Fathers and the sprawling morass that this country has become, serious problems have developed in the relationship between elected officials and demographics.

In the House of Representatives, the public option would be a shoe-in right now. Polls show people want it, and, theoretically, in a democracy the majority is supposed to have a certain degree of clout. But in the Senate the fate of reform may well be determined by the caprices of a few coy fence-straddlers like Max Baucus from Montana and Olympia Snowe from Maine (you just know these two love all the sudden attention), who hail from states that have – not to put too fine a point on it — hardly any residents.

Given the timing of Saturn going into Libra, whose purpose is to re-balance skewed situations, it may be health care reform that brings these legislative loopholes to national attention.

Such flaws in the USA’s putatively representative government are illogical, counter-intuitive and corruption-prone; but few Americans seem particularly concerned about them. The red-white-and-blue crowd doesn’t want to think their government needs deep-structure overhaul. It is easier to hurl invectives at this or that politician, and to tell themselves that by replacing him with somebody else, everything will be just fine.

It is no secret that the US public expresses little curiosity, by and large, about how laws are passed. For that matter, Americans are notorious for staying home on election day; apparently even our gubernatorial candidates don’t vote. And of course right now all this ignorance and apathy are exacerbated by the fact that a sizable chunk of the population doesn’t know where their next paycheck is coming from, inducing a state of stress that makes them sitting ducks for the fear-mongering manipulations of commercial interests and Fox News hysterics. In a recent interview, Gore Vidal pulled no punches: “[Americans are] the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.” (Okay, he’s cranky. But to my mind the old dude has earned every crumb of crank in his crank box.)

With Saturn now in Libra, smack dab on the midheaven of the US chart, the discrepancies between America’s self-image as a democracy and its actual political behavior will start to become embarrassingly obvious.

Preening patriots, get ready for your close-up.