A window opened wide in a rank and fetid room. That’s what we’ll get from the next two years of Saturn in Libra, if we play our cards right.
Air is the antidote to sentiment (excess water), lack of imagination (excess earth) and bloviating blowhards fired up by their own pseudo-convictions (Rush Limbaugh.)(I mean excess fire).
Libra is an air sign, and air is about ideas. Saturn is getting ready to give us a show-and-tell about the neglect of the mind and the abuse of ideas that has turned American public discourse into an orgy of irrationality.
Citizens who have forgotten how to think are pretty useless at self-government. But they are nice and malleable. Throughout the ages, despots and schoolyard bullies have made use of the fact that when a crowd is pissed-off and scared they are much easier to control than they are when they are thinking things through (Libra).
Saturn in Libra will soon return to its natal position in the USA chart (2011). This will be a moment of truth for the country, which is now going through a mental breakdown.
I don’t mean to be hyperbolic here. The collective is undergoing a crisis of ideation (air), and is clearly breaking down on many levels (Pluto opposite the US Sun).
Americans are internationally known for getting hot and bothered about spurious and irrelevant subjects (I mean, balloon-boy hoaxes? Are we that hard up for something to talk about?). To understand why this is so, we have to look at the scaffolding beneath the stories. That is, the complex network of talking heads, tattling tabloids and rabid radio celebrities. More problematic than the content of the national conversation is the system that delivers it, which deadens the public’s intelligence and undermines its ability to reason.
Creative thinking is not celebrated on American TV and AM radio. Truly provocative ideas are not valued, whereas faux-provocative ideas are pure gold. The coverage of what passes for “politics” is so non-informative as to be dis-informative. The result is that most of the citizenry simply doesn’t know enough to vote in their own interests. This leaves the plutocrats free to govern the country, under the snug auspices of the great national myth: that this is a government of, by and for The People.
It’s nothing new, of course, for governments to use the media to persuade people that what they’re seeing with their own eyes is a lie, while the bizarre nonsense coming out of the mouths of their spokes-flacks (at the Department of Homeland Security or Halliburton or Gavin Newsom’s office or wherever) is the truth. But it is my belief that when Saturn in Gemini (information) opposed Pluto on the US Ascendant, the American media passed a new milestone in its encouragement of idiocy.
Consider the amount of time and resources the media is currently investing in the “birther” movement and in the notion that Obama is a socialist. In George Orwell’s 1984 (which has been so heavily referenced since the Saturn-Pluto transit that it’s became a cliché; but only because it was so astoundingly prescient), the marvelous coinage Doublespeak parodied this phenomenon. The citizens in the novel were given information that wasn’t merely a distortion of the truth – it was the exact opposite of the truth. Orwell’s vision moved from fiction to fact the day Fox News started calling itself “Fair and Balanced” and got away with it.
Yet something even freakier is afoot in the US today. The news is full of voices calling Obama both a socialist and a fascist at the same time. The fantasy that the man wasn’t born in the USA is eating up air time from coast to coast. The American mind has just galloped past Doublespeak into Crazy Land.
Open the window wide, Uncle Saturn. Give us some air.
