The writing has been on the astrological wall for years.
It tells us that systems of governance are breaking down so they can be cleaned up, reshuffled and made over. It’s a natural process, and a healthy one.
But we’re probably feeling like dust motes in a windstorm. When we’re in the thick of a Pluto transit, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that destruction is part of a greater cycle. We forget that breakdown is a precursor to renewal. The rot has to be swept away.
At this point it’s useful to remember what the transit really means. Pluto isn’t just the planet of death. It’s the planet of both death and birth. It governs both graves and labor rooms, morticians and midwives.
To miss this point is to freak out and retreat into denial. But there’s no hiding from skies like these. Escapism is not only morally dubious; it doesn’t work. In fact, it backfires.
Nor gloom of night
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. —- USPS Motto
Leave it to this insane year to turn the dear old PO into a partisan football. Who can imagine a more doggedly reliable, apolitical agency than the US mail? 
I suppose if they can politicize a microbe, they can politicize anything.
This most serviceable workhorse of American institutions, the last refuge of the poor and the last hope of the un-wired, has been the victim of an intentional funding famine for decades (see John Oliver’s excellent exposé).
Now it has been given a sobering new significance by Covid-19: the final port in the storm for this shipwreck of a democracy.
Mail me in
In the annals of consciousness raising, 2020 has offered up a one-two punch. Black Lives Matter has slapped white America awake to the fact that the Jim Crow days never went away, and the pandemic is stretching racial inequities to vicious new extremes.
Some GOP officials, counting on the fact that long lines will deter any voters who don’t want to risk infection to exercise their constitutional right and duty, have been closing polling stations in minority neighborhoods. You get the image of these guys rubbing their hands together with despicable glee, Mr. Burns-style.
With mail-in ballots our last grasp at a fair process, it makes perverse sense that our Dotard-in-Chief has sicced his tiny thumbs upon absentee voting.
Oh, wait: Except for Florida. Turns out, absentee ballots are just fine for Florida. Apparently one of his handlers belatedly reminded the TwitterMan that Florida was a swing state, and that he would lose there if no one voted by mail.
Cheating
With three months to go until Election Day, the Republican Party has no platform to run on, no solutions and no new ideas. But that’s okay. They’ve set their sights on winning the old-fashioned way: by cheating.
These guys were cheating at elections long before politics was a twinkle in the eye of their fat golden boy. Trump was still scrambling for respect in New York, trying to build a real-estate empire on a mountain of debt, when the Reaganites put together their playbook to undermine the popular vote. It was a project that took them the last Saturn-Pluto cycle to perfect.
With the electoral college already skewing the odds in their favor, Republican strategists bettered their odds even further with shameless gerrymandering, voter roll purges and a crony-packed Supreme Court 
– in case they needed to boost their guy over the top in a pinch, as they did with Dubya vs. Gore.
More recently, they’ve added digital cheating to their repertoire, with the help of friendly social media 
billionaires and Russian hackers.
And then there’s the Bizarro-World Kanye West candidacy, a phenomenon only a year like 2020 could have spawned. In their bottomless cynicism, the Trump campaign is trying to get Kanye on the ballot in enough swing states to tempt young Black voters away from Biden.
You Say Potahto; Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
Even in the hellscape of the Civil War, Lincoln refused to delay the presidential election. Yet nothing could be more hideously predictable than the fact that Hairplug Himmler (1) would try to do just that.
Unpacking his tweet of 7/30 makes for a horrifyingly fascinating exercise. He began with a pseudo-warning about the [all-caps] fraudulence of mail-in ballots, the use of which would make for “a great embarrassment to our country. (2)
He ended his tweet with a coy question. “So should we delay the election to ensure a secure vote???” Students of sociopathy will have noticed that three-question-mark shrug – as in “Just asking!” — to ensure deniability.
Classic Trumpian con. He’s an imbecile, but he wields shadow Gemini (communication) with evil genius. No one has a keener nose for the country’s malignant id.
The man doesn’t need more than forty words to check all the boxes from the dictator’s playbook:
A fascist guide to commentary on elections would have eight parts: contradict yourself to test the faith of your followers; tell a big lie to draw attention from basic realities; manufacture a crisis; designate enemies; make an appeal to pride and humiliation; express hostility to voting; cast doubt on democratic procedures; and aim for personal power. — Timothy Snyder
So in order to implement his wicked vision… But wait a minute. What’s his vision, again?
Unlike the compelling dictators of history, our potato-brained Caligula doesn’t have a vision. His agenda really is as simple as it appears. He’s as bland as his diet, and just as predictable, because he doesn’t grow.
Papa’s sneers
It’s the tragically ordinary story of a youth-damaged narcissist, as Mary Trump has now confirmed. (According to satirist Andy Borowitz, in a new inner circle shakeup, Trump is replacing his niece with Kayleigh McEnany).
Imagine the insecurity that must plague a man so terrified of being seen as a loser that he would dismantle the foundations of democracy in order to avoid personal embarrassment.
Papa Fred may be dead and gone, but his sneers are still echoing in Little Donnie’s ears.
State of disunion
So here we are, twelve weeks until Moment of Truth Day.
The authoritarianism plotline and the pandemic plotline keep mingling in ways that would be really fun and interesting anyplace other than real life. – Shower Cap
With Covid now racking up 1,000 deaths a day, it’s coming out that back in the early weeks of the pandemic — when Uncle Sam had the chance to actually get this thing under control — translucent First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner slithered out of his WestWorld milk bath (3) and shut down a national 
testing plan. The worst outbreaks were in blue states, and he didn’t want Democratic governors to benefit politically from the lives the tests might save.
With the worst downturn since the Great Depression upon us, a tsunami of evictions has begun. Yet unemployment benefits remain stonewalled by Majority Tortoise Mitch McConnell (4) and the other 
hollowed-out husks in the GOP. These venerable public servants say they’re worried the checks would make people so comfortable they won’t go back to work.
While peaceful protesters in Portland are recovering from being dragged into unmarked vans by agents of the state, the White House is cooking up “Operation LeGend.” The name smacks of a Bush-era foreign invasion, but Trump’s storm troopers are to be deployed more locally, in an American city near you.
Meanwhile, his Justice Department is trying to lift a court order protecting journalists, who, it is argued, 
could actually be antifa terrorists disguised as cub reporter Jimmy Olson.
With hurricane season coming ashore in the East and wildfire season upon the West, where do we find our Tangerine Idi Amin? Why, he is on the golf course, thinking up ways to go after TikTok and build an anti-climb wall around the White House.
There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. — George Will
Pollyanna vs. Debbie Downer
From a certain type of spiritual thinker, we sometimes hear that taking the world situation seriously means we’re being “negative.”
It is human to feel angst when confronting disaster. But to apply the negative/ positive polarity in this context is to confuse reality with states of mind. Acknowledging reality isn’t a state of mind. Keeping our eyes open isn’t pessimism.
Similarly misguided is the idea that doing our best to stay creative and positive is just being a “Pollyanna,” i.e. naïve or unserious.
But surely, a broken and flailing situation is exactly the right occasion for the highest and most visionary approach we can muster.
We are capable of being both positive and realistic at once. All of us were born with both Neptune (faith in the perfection of the Universe) and Saturn (awareness of the limitations of the Earth plane) in our charts. And right now, more than ever, we need to make use of both.
Speaking of the limitations of the Earth plane
We also need to hold onto our moral core (Jupiter). It’ll help us to stay sane amidst a pubic 
conversation that gaslights us by the hour.
It’s no good playing Susan Collins, feebly hoping, every time, that Trump wouldn’t dare go that far. Or thinking the case is settled because legal scholars say delaying the election is unconstitutional. Seth Meyers says this scenario reminds him of the class nerd explaining why the bullies can’t steal his lunch money, while they’re dunking his head in the toilet.
It does seem unlikely that Team TreasonWeasel (5) will be able to delay the election. But it is very likely that he will keep thinking up new distractions, each as dangerous as this one, every few days until November 3rd.
As within, so without
What are these insane times trying to teach us? If you follow astrology, you’ve heard about the transits’ general meaning. As to how you, personally, fit into this great churning mess, figuring that out is the great work right now.
We observe the chaos while acknowledging our participation in it. We keep our sights trained on some version of the question, How is my individual karma intersecting with the collective karma?
And we stay awake, like a good midwife who wouldn’t dream of falling asleep while something is struggling to be born.
Notes
1) .. and the award for Most Imaginative Trump Insults goes to: the Shower Cap blog.
2) Except for, remember, Florida, the state in which he himself has voted absentee. He accounted for this exception five days later, with eloquent and unimpeachable logic: “Florida is different from other states,” tweeted he.
3) Insult compliments of puckish snark artist Seth Meyers.
4) Derived from Tartarus (<Greek tartaroûcha), the tortoise being regarded as an infernal animal; from Latin tortus crooked, twisted.
5) Shower Cap, ibid
