Joe Biden found himself unable, for whatever reasons, to keep up the tradition of kicking the bloody can down the road to some future president.

Under the Full Moon of August, he struggled to explain the origins of the occupation of Afghanistan (it’s being called a “war,” but that doesn’t seem the mot juste when superpowers try to steal countries), claiming that the USA’s mission had never been nation building. “Okay,” retorted John Oliver, ”then I guess not-Mission not-Accomplished.”

Are there still people who can hear the oxymoron “peacekeeping force” as anything other than Pentagon spin? 

Amidst the chaos of the waning Moon came bombs at the airport, followed by desperately improbable Washington bombast: “We will hunt you down.”

I felt the impulse to dig into the archives and look up a blog I wrote eleven years ago.

The Death (Pluto) of the Age of Empire (Capricorn)

Would that I could send the good generals a copy of Heaven’s Command, in which historian James Morris describes the massacre of British occupiers at Kabul in 1842. A century and a half after these soldiers of the Queen were driven to their deaths in those unforgiving ravines, the intrepid Morris went back to Afghanistan and asked a toothless old villager what would happen if his country were occupied again. “The same!” he hissed.

Forgetting

We Americans, unlike the Afghans, don’t have much of a head for history. But even if the national memory could be jogged a mere couple of decades, we might be able to squeeze a half-teaspoon of learning from this most predictable of catastrophes.

We might remember how, after 9/11, the frenzy for revenge saw even reasonable people lose all common sense, jumping on the stupidwagon to bomb somebody, anybody.

Although not, curiously, the country most of the hijackers hailed from: Saudi Arabia. Led by Big Oil, Washington skillfully guided the tsunami of patriotic rage safely away from the land of the sheiks. Nor did many Americans find the bizarre oil business connections between the Bush and Bin Laden families interesting enough to dig into.

No, in a leap of illogic that only a public drunk on Rambo movies could make, avenging the Twin Towers was construed to mean bombing Afghanistan. Something to do with the Taliban.

Forget about the fact that the Taliban had originally been funded by Uncle Sam himself, back when the CIA needed a band of local zealots to fight the Russians. Forget about the fact that when the Taliban offered to arrest Bin Laden, Dubya Bush, who wanted to be a big-boy wartime president, turned them down. Definitely forget about the fact that “bomb Afghanistan” meant bomb the people of Afghanistan, already suffering in ways you have no idea about.

Forget everything and fire up the drones.

Seventy thousand civilian deaths and a trillion dollars later, here we are. The military contractors, as usual, were the only winners. Financially, at least. Karma-wise, I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.

For only $6500, those trapped in Afghanistan… can now reserve a seat on a charter flight operated by a military contractor. The scheme is the brainchild of Blackwater founder Erik Prince, whose company made billions from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Michael Karlis

And what about our own karma, as individuals? Can we pose the question not in a spirit of blame, but as a psycho-spiritual exercise?

The ability to respond

Guilt and blame are dodges. They are an avoidance of real responsibility, a.k.a. the ability to respond.

Responsibility is a teaching of Saturn, which is gearing up for its third exactitude with Uranus (sudden insight). If we let it, Saturn could steer us towards a deeper understanding of our karmic involvement in this critical period on Earth.

Planes without men

The word “responsible” has become so closely tied to the concept of blame that it’s hard to see it as meaning anything else. So let’s use “involved.”

Even if we didn’t vote for a warmongering candidate, ordinary Americans are involved in Afghanistan from a financial point of view. As taxpayers we sponsor those high-tech drones, called by the Afghan people “planes without men.”

More directly involved, of course, are the American soldiers who “pilot” the drones. Although not really directly involved, because maybe they’re just clicking on a computer screen in Arizona to blow up a suspected militant (or – oops – a wedding party) in Central Asia. With sociopathic genius, the weapon-makers came up with a remote system to keep our soldiers from bodily harm. It plays better, politically, to restrict the killing to non-Americans.

Digitalized killing also seems to have been intended to mitigate the soldiers’ burden of psychological responsibility. But it seems unlikely that Saturn, the god of karma, is thrown off the scent, if the PTSD and suicides of returning service members are anything to go by.

From a geopolitical point of view, the involvement of ordinary Americans in this atrocity derives from our citizenship in the invading country. We may protest that we don’t identify with Uncle Sam, its foreign policy, its elected officials, etc, etc. And yet, here we are.

From an astrological point of view, the fact that we’re here and not somewhere else is not an accident.

Thunderbolts

Remember that Capricorn stellium that arrived in 2020 like a thunderbolt from the galactic center? It signaled the breakup and makeover of global power structures.

The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction. — Adrienne Rich

Then came the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn on the winter Solstice, to destroy our complacency about the wielding of power. To instill in its place a courageous, unsentimental curiosity about how the world works.

It’s human nature to want to skip that step. We don’t like the distress and uncertainty of deep inquiry. We just want to know what to do.

But planetary cycles don’t prescribe actions. Nor do they tell us the right theory or ideology or explanation for the suffering in Afghanistan or elsewhere. They don’t supply answers at all.

They just prod us to take responsibility for being alive, right here, right now.