“If Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a tragedy, then Trump’s is history repeating itself as farce.” — Noam Chomsky

How do we talk about the sordid drama underway in Washington?

The conventional media can only offer up its anesthetized talking heads, who seem as eviscerated by futility as the politicians themselves. Helplessly locked in position, like trench soldiers in stalemate.

Better we should turn to poetry and myth, if meaning is what we want.

The mythologist Martin Shaw says we’re going through a stint in the Underworld, too momentous for the language of party politics:

The Underworld chews up sound bites, gnaws on the feeble marrow of platitude, pummels certainty or sweeping predictions into the greasy darkness of the cave to gobble later.

Astrological symbols offer us another sort of poetic meaning. Consider the logic of planetary cycles, which wax into hearty fullness and then wane into pallid versions of their former selves. For the USA, the cycle of Pluto is waning.

As it limps towards the finish line, the American Experiment is coming undone. ⁽¹⁾

For the people

But when it started, it was exploding with life force. Democracy was a hot new concept back in 1776, when the current Pluto cycle was born. Now, like most organisms in their dotage, it is riddled with decay.

An archetype isn’t the same as the forms it takes. Symbolized by the aspects in the country’s birth chart, the elegant notions of equality and individuality that spawned the USA are abstractions. They are raw nuggets of ideational potential, that get extruded into form by a given historical context.

We can’t understand a cycle in its geriatric phase with the presumptions that shaped its infancy. As Pluto slowly wheels around to its starting position, our preconceptions about American power have to be reformulated.

As originally conceived, they don’t apply any more.

Shaw again:

…this is the nightworld we are entering… But we are still using dayworld words. This is why so little works.

Socio-pathology

Also at the end of its tether is democracy in the non-political sense.

When it first burst upon the scene, our fabulous new friend, the internet, was envisioned as an unprecedentedly egalitarian, seamlessly connected commons. This starry-eyed ideal now finds itself in fatal peril.

At this point in the cycle, ⁽²⁾ the ugly side of social media is everywhere apparent. Incessant online connectivity is replacing opioids as the definitive socio-pathology of our era.

The Internet offered so much hope for everyone in the world to have a voice, be heard, be seen, have validation that he or she exists. A guy like Zuckerberg came along and exploited this hope and struck pay dirt, by creating an environment that gave everything to everyone, in one walled-garden locale. — astrologer Frederick Woodruff

The state and the marketplace

Astrologers have long seen the year 2020 as a geopolitical turning point. As the crises in Washington and Europe make clear, the Capricorn stellium now buzzing overhead has pretty much killed off the last vestiges of denial among the First World public about what’s going on in their democracies.

Most now seem to understand that their government serves the interests of global moneyed interests, not of the electorate. Pluto (corporations) has teamed up with Saturn (the state).

FaceBook, a company with the reach of an empire, is emblematic of this merger. As Woodruff writes, the network has corralled everyone into Zuckerberg’s purview, all of us willingly complicit in our own unraveling.

And that of democracy.

Here and Now

That is, democracy in its current degraded state. Not to be confused with democracy as a pure concept. The Pluto Return, peaking in 2022, is challenging Uncle Sam to get back to the essence of the thing, while repudiating the corruptions that have set in over time.

When Pluto enters Aquarius (2024) we will be in new territory. We’ll be scrambling to get our moral and spiritual maturity up to speed with our technological maturity (discussed in this webinar).

Until then, it’s about accepting where we are. Just as the spiritual teachers counsel us to accept our own bodily deaths, astrology advises us to accept the death of used-up cycles. Our work right now is to acknowledge what’s collapsing of its own weight.

Notes

1) Under Pluto in Capricorn (governmental and economic systems), ordinary Americans started to glimpse the wolf of plutocracy (2nd house of US chart) underneath its guise of democracy. In 2013, while Uranus and Pluto were squaring each other, a movie came out that showed the sheepskin falling off.

2) In 1993 Uranus (technology) conjoined Neptune (universality). Pluto (disintegration) caught up with the conjunction degree in 2017, and the public’s initial infatuation with tech started to break down.