Do you watch Jon Stewart’s “fake news?” The Daily Show is my primary health care provider, offering therapeutic release through snark. Without him, many of us would explode from pent-up outrage and frustration at the tin-eared babble that passes for news.

But every once in a while I’m reminded that professional skewerer Stewart is as wedded to the official narrative as those he skewers. His reactions to media idiocy are part and parcel of the same closed system, ricocheting against the inside walls of the conceptual box that is American Pretend Politix.

Red and Blue

Though he is embarrassingly more intelligent than his targets, Brother Jon plays into the same assumption: that Teams Red and Blue comprise the only possible ways to see what’s going on in the world.

What troubles me is the unquestioned nature of this all-but-universally-held American perspective. It shapes not only the opinions about the news, but what constitutes news in the first place.

Stewart has elevated fake news to an art form. But he doesn’t address the fact that the Dems-vs.-GOP framework is itself fake.

Benghazi

The Benghazi episode is again in the headlines, after the release this month of new documents related to the 2012 embassy attack. It’s a gold mine for the Daily Show. The GOP’s apoplectic fixation with Benghazi is tailor-made for a comic like Stewart, who elicits big laughs with it from his hip, young, disdainful audience.

The Benghazi incident first sprang into the headlines in 2012, when the big transit began that astrologers call the cardinal cross. This spring is a pinnacle for the cross. Key global themes from two years ago are being amplified now.

Over the US airwaves, we find the knee-jerk “conservatives” again attacking Susan Rice,¹ and the knee-jerk “liberals” defending her. But neither red nor blue wants to talk about what’s genuinely interesting, topical, thought-provoking.

Such as Rice’s investments in the banks behind the Keystone Pipeline, and her history of backing repressive despots in Africa.

Why don’t we hear information like this from the punditry panel? It’s certainly juicy enough. Why do we not hear it at all, unless we make an effort to look for it?

It’s because this kind of information would disrupt the official narrative. The big tell here isn’t about Susan Rice, nor Benghazi, nor the dueling arguments themselves. It’s about the simplistic binary perspective that imprisons the American mind.

Ukraine

It’s an institutional myopia, and I realized the extent to which it had infected the Daily Show when they took on the Ukraine issue.

Of course I appreciated Jessica Williams’ Russian accent and the cleverness with which the sketch was written. But I hated seeing these sharp cultural critics  fall into step with the dualistic formula, whereby all Americans must sign up to be either pro-Obama-&-anti-Fox, or the other way around.

The Crimea crisis blew up when April’s transits were peaking, with Pluto (destruction), Uranus (explosions), Jupiter (international scope) and Mars (militarism) configured at the fourteenth degree of their respective signs.² The astrological sucker punch is an intractable natal square between Uncle Sam and Vladimir Putin. The USA’s Sun at 13° Cancer squares Putin’s at 13° Libra.³

The exact 90° angle between these two charts symbolizes an exact parity between antagonists. Both sides of this he said/ he said crisis in the Crimea are playing the same game. It’s the old patriarchal-order (Capricorn) world-domination (Pluto) game,⁴ an approach to global control that has been stuck in arrested development for way too long.

Now it’s all coming undone, as the industrial age – once in glorious ascendancy, now in exhausted decline — draws to a close.

Old Rivalry

During the USSR years, the West’s Russophobia was spun as a democracy-vs.-communism thing. Then the Russians jumped into our camp — unapologetic capitalism⁵  — and the old script had to be scrapped.

A new Washington battle cry coherent enough to justify the old rivalry has not yet emerged. This muddles the official narrative, but it doesn’t change what’s really going on. The true motives of the Great Democracies are pretty much the same as they’ve always been.

The plutocrats of the West want a sphere of influence: a nice, compliant NATO-ized country on Russia’s border. To get it, they’re trying to maneuver another regime change; or, as it used to be called, imperial conquest.⁶

The Obama administration isn’t yet copping to their investment in the Ukraine operation.⁷ But if and when the news leaks out, I’m sure they’ll tell us it was done to promote “American interests.”

Here, too, is a phrase that evokes more skepticism among the public than it did a generation ago. People are starting to realize that “American interests” refers not to the values and freedoms of ordinary folks, but to the geopolitical, financial and strategic interests of a teeny-tiny segment of powerful players.

Avoiding the Trap

For Americans observing this nasty business, it takes a boost from the will, at this point, to avoid the either/or thinking everyone seems to be stuck in. If we avoid that trap, certain things become egregiously obvious. First and foremost, that just because Washington policymakers are corrupt, cynical power-mongers who lie to their citizenry doesn’t mean that Putin is not a duplicitous, manipulative bully about whom you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he skins squirrels with his teeth.

Were Americans to get actual information instead of propaganda from their social channels (an enlightened society would mandate, right now, that a semester of Crimean history be taught in all high schools), it would be clear that the two sides in the Ukraine crisis mirror each other precisely. They are equally representative of a dying era.

It is to the symbols of astrology that many of us look for meaning in these fractious times. They are the soundest guide of all if what we want is the big picture behind the opinions. Pluto is returning to its birth placement in the chart of the USA; the transit peaks in 2022 (I write about the US Pluto Return in the Feb/Mar 2014 issue of The Mountain Astrologer.)

As the old geopolitical pecking order crumbles and gives way to a new one, we can be certain of this: it’s not lost on any of the world’s governments that Russia has fossil fuels (Pluto). Vlad the Bad is the dubious overlord of a disappearing treasure that has come to symbolize extinction.⁸

Assault

Meanwhile, let us withstand what David Pinchbeck has called the mass media’s numbing assault on the human psyche. There’s an art to attending to it while not buying into it. It takes being aware of what’s happening beneath, through and in spite of the spin.

We may get a good laugh from John Stewart, and we may choose to partake of the mainstream media; I believe American consciousness-seekers should, if only to know what we’re up against. But if we fail to see beyond the media’s reductionist formulas, our philosophical and ethical capacities cannot fully develop.

If, instead of honoring our Jupiters, we give them away, our view of the world becomes the intellectual equivalent of a windowless room.

Notes

1 The weirdly vicious personal attacks against Rice on the part of the right wing have, from the beginning, smacked of racism and misogyny. This has made her a flashpoint for a couple of recognizable culture-war memes, which in turn makes it especially tempting for her defenders to react, justifiably, in kind. Thus the cycle devolves all the more readily into a for-or-against standoff.

2 During the violent eruptions in mid-to-late April between Ukranian troops and Pro-Russian fighters, the four corners of the cross were exact at 13-14° of their respective cardinal signs.

3 Putin was born October 7, 1952, at 9:30 a.m. in St. Petersburg.

4 Uncle Sam’s immediate predecessor in the world domination department was England, which spent much of the 19^th Century locked in a feverish rivalry with Russia that London called “The Great Game.” (It’s hard to imagine Washington’s diplomatic corps coming up with a phrase this ironically self-aware.)

It was this high-spirited xenophobia that gave birth to a popular music hall ditty whence we get the term jingoism. Among the lyrics: “We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo, if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too. We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true, the Russians shall not have Constantinople.”

5 A mind-boggling 35 percent of household wealth in Russia is owned by just 110 people. Even the USA doesn’t have income disparity this stark.

6 The standard m.o. is to send in money, guns and spooks, either overtly (Granada, VietNam, Iraq, et al) or covertly (Chile, Haiti, Venezuela, ad nauseum).

7 The overthrow of Ukraine’s government in February was part of an operation led by the same cartel that brought us the Iraq war in 2003. The State Department’s representative to Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, was once Dick Cheney’s foreign policy adviser; her husband is Robert Kagan, the guy who co-founded the Project for a New American Century. In her speech to a Washington think tank last December, Nuland assured the assembled neo-cons that the $5 billion Washington had invested in the operation to “assist Ukraine” would “ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.”

8 As nonrenewable energy sources derived from extinct creatures, oil and natural gas are themselves going extinct. Moreover the overuse of these fuels has given rise to massive species extinction. Oil’s association with extinction provides the primary dystopian image of our era. See “Pluto in the Age of Oil”.