Spike Lee is on fire. He has two new releases out, one short and one long, just in the past month.
Both films place American racism in historical context. Both are redolent with anguished humanity. Their timing is so spot-on, given the firestorm unleashed by the killing of George Floyd, that people are calling it uncanny.
But prescience like this is as organic as picking up a scent from the breeze. It’s what happens when someone is in touch with his times.
“Da 5 Bloods” connects the dots between the massive popular unrest of the sixties, under the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, and 
the passions erupting in the streets right now, as Uranus and Pluto finish their waxing square.
Great art can connect dots this way. And never have we needed it more.
A multitude of plagues
As June began, Americans woke up in the morning and remembered: Oh yeah, there’s a pandemic on.
And the country’s sliding towards tin-pot dictatorship. And our government is a sociopathic clown show, our cities are aflame, our police are militarized, (1) and a third of our brothers and sisters remain in thrall to a malignant buffoon who tells them to drink bleach.(2) Who among us doesn’t want to close our eyes again and hide under the covers?
But Spike Lee doesn’t want to, which is why he’s a great role model right now.
Never one to pull his punches about the depth and breadth of racism in America, Lee nonetheless remains unfettered by despair. In fact, the past few weeks have energized him. “I’m built for this,” he says.
A photo-op and a film
Jupiter and Pluto were together in the sky – the “might makes right” conjunction — when Trump staged that grotesque photo-op in front of a Washington church: a performance so jaw-droppingly ghastly that it has already become iconic.
In what Susan Glasser describes as “a tragic combination of the menacing and the absurd,” storm 
troopers fired rubber bullets into a group of peaceful protesters to clear the path for the commander-in-beef to stand there and scowl awkwardly into the cameras while holding up a bible like a deli ticket.
Later, our “low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath” (George Will) railed against the health experts for being overly cautious. He needed to discredit them so he could get his base back into the stadiums. For three months he’d been jonesing for a rally.
Now he had a date to froth up his fans with racist dog whistles (more like dog megaphones, said Larry Wilmore) on Juneteenth.
Complexity
“Da 5 Bloods” debuted around the same time. Like all epic art, the film allows its heroes elements of tragedy, comedy, and deep flaw. It doesn’t shy away from contradictions.
Contrast this generosity of vision with that of the public conversation right now. Confused and anxious, the group mind has never seemed so threatened by subtleties.
This presents a quandary for anybody who’s interested in meaning. Such as astrologers, who know that if we want higher truth, we have to integrate all the conflicting elements of our inner and outer lives, and deny none of them (discussed in this webinar).
If you’ve ever tackled the squares and oppositions of a birth chart, you know that paradox is the name of the game.
Stunted political imaginations
In 2020, the idea that “There is no such thing as apolitical” rings truer than ever. With the sky full of Capricorn, you’d have to really sweat to avoid confronting issues of social justice.
But it’s tricky. We do need to stay on top of “politics” as most Americans define it, because we need to know what’s up with consensus thinking. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think the binary culture war is all there is to what’s happening.
Big Media is in charge of how the flow of events is perceived by most people, and simplistic thinking is 
Big Media’s bread and butter. (3) Its news writers are paid to toss the complex mess that is human life into the meat grinder, power up the reductionist templates and turn out tasty little pellets of coverage.
And the public is as hungry for speed as the telecom giants are hungry for profits. Who has time for perspective?
Before we’ve digested the latest crisis, we are informed — by the anchorfolk of our particular ideological bubble – of the next crisis. Then they tell us where the “right” and “left” stand on it, so we can jump on our identified bandwagon and ingest its point of view with our morning coffee. 
The process reminds me of those numbered colored pencil sets that came with a coloring book. Each page featured a scene that was broken up into numbered segments, and you filled in the appropriate color. My mother wouldn’t buy me one. She said they left nothing for the imagination to do.
At least they gave you a bunch of colors. The public conversation today allows us only two: red and blue.
Quick, rioter or reactionary?
Into this ideological wasteland has leapt the nation’s reckoning with racism.
From those thinkers and activists who are truly responding, we are hearing much-needed lessons in history, civics and philosophy. Such as about Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, left out of our history books as children but on our radar now.
These are the voices this moment is calling out for.
Meanwhile, from the bullet-point media, we get slogans.
“Abolish the police” was an immediate hit among the talking heads, as it was sure to get a rise out of everybody. But a slogan isn’t a debate, and for lazy thinkers it reduced systemic racism — a complex tapestry of interconnected abominations woven together across continents and over centuries – to a ballot proposition with two options: For or Against.
It reminds me of that old trick question: “Quick, answer yes or no: Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”
Kill the Pigs
There is a place for slogans, and not just on protest signs.
Some of them communicate deeper meaning on their own terms. The best are remembered as cris de coeur: shards of poetry, arising from the mass mind.
Such as “All mothers everywhere were summoned when George Floyd called out for his mama.”
The sixties version of “Abolish the police” was “Kill the pigs.” (4) With the distance of time, we have come to understand it not as a literal battle cry, but a pop abbreviation. It’s the visceral sound of a society in breakdown mode.
With the distance of astrology, we understand such slogans as Pluto’s wrecking ball, crashing through the walls of deep-structure corruption and denial.
One-shot fix
Reactionaries, so called because they react rather than respond, are sure to be spooked by “Abolish the police.” Unseasoned activists have also seized upon it: a punchy slogan is sexier than the long, dogged work of policy implementation.
But repairing this broken society isn’t going to be a one-shot fix.
Calls for reform (Jupiter) have been intensified (Pluto) by the conjunction overhead, but a more epochal transit in the background reveals the bigger picture.
The oppression doesn’t end, it adapts. — historian Nicholas Creary
The U.S. Pluto Return (death/ renewal) has been anticipated by astrologers for many years. It suggests that a nation founded in slavery — updated as the mass incarceration of nonwhites — cannot dig itself out of its corruptions overnight.
Pluto’s not impressed by half-assed Congressional bills or the recall of the logo of a pancake mix.
Nor by mewling public mea culpas. The “I Take Responsibility” videos that have emerged from celebrities like Ashton Kuchner may be well-intentioned but come off as clueless and narcissistic.
As for the fulsome declarations of support for BLM that have been hastily issued by corporations like Walmart and Bank of America, you have to wonder how their PR departments ever imagined these things would come off as anything other than nauseatingly hypocritical.
Covid still here
The pandemic is of course still with us, looming in the background, waiting for its next surge.
Like Black Lives Matter, Covid-19 is a player in the Plutonian dismantling. Revealing 
the brokenness of America’s governing institutions (Capricorn) is part of the virus’ job.
As crises will, the pandemic is forcing many to face the unsavory nether-workings of their society, including the plutocratic logic that allows millions of its citizens to teeter on the edge of destitution as billionaires scramble to cash in before everything burns to the ground.
But breakdown isn’t a simple trajectory downward. Organic decay is complex. Like a rotting log sprouting new green shoots, in a failing state the rebirth overlaps with the death.
Hints of societal rebirth abound, right now, amidst the chaos. Think about the compassionate community spirit that has arisen at ground-level, as Americans realized their government wasn’t going to step up.
The protests too are a vibrant upsurge of life. They have galvanized a historic movement in a few extraordinary weeks.
The problem can only be solved when there is a kind of coalition of conscience. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
The street action has been crackling with immediacy, unity and courage. Despite cops who have answered accusations of brutality with more brutality, despite surveillance drones and helicopters thump-thump-thumping overhead, the protesters have kept on coming.
Their motivating fuel is anger, symbolized by Eris and now, by Mars in Aries. This anger includes the appropriate and 
righteous kind, as well as the violent and out-of-control kind — the latter exaggerated, of course, by the media, which has dished up all the scenes of looting it could find.
Can we take all this in without putting it in a good/bad box? Massive change isn’t morally neat and comfy.
Pluto doesn’t care whether or not we approve of its workings.
Symbol readers
Like astrologers, artists speak in symbols. They seek to confer meaning upon events and unfetter the mind from complacency.
A case in point is the release, just now, of Bob Dylan’s first new song in eight years, “Murder Most Foul.” True to form, it’s an incongruous array of images from wildly diverse historical periods, all jumbled together as in a dream.
Dylan is ambiguously implicit; Lee is passionately explicit. Both are cosmic weathermen who know 
which way the wind blows. Too wise to propose answers, they eloquently raise questions.
Granted, you and I aren’t Bob Dylan or Spike Lee. We aren’t all artists per se. We may not be leaders in an official capacity, or political activists.
But if we don’t march, we can pray. If we don’t pray, we can meditate. We can get into our heart through music. We can play with a child. We can make flowers grow. We can weep.
Unique response
There are more than seven billion ways to respond to the pain and upheaval the world is in.
We each have all the creativity we need (Venus) to come up with a response that is truly authentic. We each have the intelligence (Mercury), the courage (Mars), the sense of ethics (Jupiter). We each have a responsibility to the society we live in (Saturn).
We are each capable of unlimited compassion (Neptune), despite our wounds (Chiron). We each occupy a definitively unique place in this world moment (Uranus). We share with our fellows a mortal lifetime (Pluto) that we can either show up for, or not.
Like Spike, we were built for this.
Notes
1) Trump’s Defense Secretary Mark Esper defended the use of tear gas and rubber bullets against 
demonstrators by declaring the police needed to “dominate the battle space” after a shooting in a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot. Stephen Colbert imagined the protesters’ response: “Don’t shoot! He’s not a real colonel! Listen, Mr President, you don’t want to launch a land invasion in America without a clear exit strategy. That’s a quagmire. You’ll never quell the local people, they’re too heavily armed. And the fact that you’re president proves they’re not ready for democracy.”
2) A literal example of the opposition in the USA chart between Mercury (information) and Pluto (death). As astrologer Frederick Woodruff points out, here we have “information/misinformation (Mercury) that will actually kill us (Pluto).”
3) Few give a thought to the cui bono of the news industry. We even seem to forget that it is an industry.
4) Perhaps the offensive puerility of “Kill the pigs” can be chalked up to the fact that it arose from a cycle in its infancy (the Uranus-Pluto conjunction), whereas “Defund the police” arises from a more mature phase of the same cycle (its waxing square).
