So they finally got their way. The dogged little cadre of religious fascists who vowed fifty years ago to re-outlaw abortion played the long game, and finally scored. ⁽¹⁾  They were the tortoise and everybody else was the hare.

These guys know full well that the American public is overwhelmingly in favor of legal abortion. But this wasn’t ever about the will of the majority. The Christian cabal and their black-caped crusaders have never been much interested in democracy. It’s theocracy they want.

Neither was it ever really about politics. They maneuvered themselves into the front lines of the rightwing establishment so as to pack the courts, but their choice of candidates has been a means to an end. Their enemies were secular humanists of either party.

Grand Ol’ Party

Among the unfolding drama, can we learn anything from the news? We can, if we maintain a detached curiosity while we watch. You can’t tell the players without a score card.

The different factions of the GOP are revealing themselves in sharp relief. The cohort who planned this heist have little in common with the clueless old politicians who bumble around just trying to keep their jobs, e.g. Ron Johnson, of fake-phonecall fame. And the bumblers play a very different role from cut-throat young schemers like DeSantis, an essentially amoral creature who’s angling for the top job and doing whatever it takes to get there.

These distinctions tend to get lost in liberal anxiety about the midterms.

Politix

Already lost, for many Americans of good conscience, is any perspective beyond that of establishment politics.

When the pendulum swings in public affairs, it’s human nature to swing back the other way: to react to the reactionaries by moving our affiliation farther to the left.⁽²⁾ But this just moves us to a different place along the same axis. ⁽³⁾ We’ve given ourselves a different shade of red or blue, but we’re stuck with the same two colors.

Most news coverage, of course, presents no other model: it’s always the same two teams fighting, along a horizontal track. Consider the absurdity of CNN calling the ruling that gutted environmental regulation “a defeat” not for life on the planet, but “for the Biden administration.”

This horizontal track does not present a realistic understanding of life in the USA, nor can it lead to deep-structure change. We need to see things in terms of a vertical track: with the 1% at the top and everybody else below. But we’re certainly not going to get that kind of perspective from the corporate media. They’re hardly about to concede that the country’s power dynamics work to assure a victory of the same class of people in election after election. 

We’re better off using our own frameworks of understanding. Critical times require critical thinking.

International cautionary tale

The USA’s global identity has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Once the great hyperpower of the world, we’re now trying to adjust to our new role as an international cautionary tale.

As astro-trackers know, during these years of the Pluto Return the edifices of  government were fated to crumble, one by one. Now that the transit has reached exactitude, the American Experiment is entering a do-or-die phase. If you’ve ever had a Pluto transit to your own chart, you know how this works. The whole cannot heal until the rot in each part is exposed and dug out.

The sign Pluto is currently in, Capricorn, rules national institutions. Of these, the Supreme Court was the last to retain a modicum of legitimacy in the American mind. It managed to hold onto credibility longer than the chief executive did. Definitely longer than Congress did.

But the abortion ruling marks a turning point in the Court’s reputation. Like the emperor of myth, the justices have been revealed to be buck-naked under their fancy black robes.

A shock but not a surprise

The decision was not so much news as an official announcement, a confirmation of what everybody already knew.

The collective unconscious is in touch with seismic shifts before they manifest as events. The American psyche had been prepping itself with the Me Too movement of 2018, which introduced a new wave of feminism. Shortly after that, a meme popped up that turned out to be stunningly apposite: the bonnets and capes from The Handmaid’s Tale.

Yet, even after the leak several weeks ago that spelled out what the Court was planning, the ruling landed like a bombshell. ⁽⁴⁾  It was as explicit and deafening as the cannonball at Fort Sumpter that inaugurated the last civil war. Like that earlier bombshell, this one is shaking the country’s foundations.  The anger and distress it is provoking is perhaps especially noteworthy among women who had not, until now, been personally impacted by the misogyny baked into our legal institutions.

Sometimes, while you may not be interested in the culture war, the culture war is nonetheless interested in you. — Glenn Greenwald

Not that gynophobia is confined to courts and lawmakers. As every woman knows, it is alive and well amongst the humble masses we deal with everyday.

Keep ‘em barefoot and pregnant. – American folk wisdom

Brothers under the skin

The recent Amber-Heard-Johnny-Depp horror show was a testament to the misogyny of the common boy-man, amplified by the megaphone of social media.

You didn’t have to watch the trial to be aware of it. It put a garishly toxic relationship on display for a rubbernecking world, conducted as a he-said/-she-said dual. It was obvious that the marital abuse was mutual, in intent if not in effect. It wasn’t as if either of them was going to come out smelling like a rose.

But the vitriol heaped upon the woman in the court of public opinion was, qualitatively and quantitatively, unlike anything directed at the man. It was a digital witch-burning. The viral onslaught against Amber Heard bristled with dangerous craziness, like a howl from the masculine principle in arrested development. It called to mind the projected rage of incels.

Remember Elliot Rodger, the guy who killed six people in 2014, before posting a “retribution” video on YouTube that blamed women en masse for making him do what he did? Afterwards he shot himself. Since then, he has apparently become an incel hero.

Not that Johnny himself could be supposed to suffer from incel problems. As Mary Gaitskill notes, Depp represented the power in this couple. He outclassed Amber in terms of social power, physical strength and charisma.

But the movie star and the anonymous trolls proved to be brothers under the skin. Depp’s much-quoted fantasy about fucking Amber’s drowned corpse must have thrilled those of his followers who dream of causing grievous harm to the prom queens who rejected them in high school. His vow to give Heard the “total global humiliation” she was “begging for” must have left them flushed with vicarious vindication.

Violent and puerile as a video game, most of the anti-Heard comments featured elements of sexual sadism. This is a theme found in societies in breakdown mode. like Weimer Germany. Except the Hitler Jugend didn’t have a couple of things we have now: mail-order automatic weapons and internet rape.

The fear and loathing of women is as old as patriarchy, but social media has given it a noisome ubiquity. It has become normative to hurl pseudonymous abuse upon a stranger. And in this case, it was a very pretty stranger; whose own pathologies, fate and foolishness made her the perfect target.

Some of the viciousness came from women. One imagines these girls still smarting from a long-ago humiliation inflicted by some mean girl in a locker room. Just as the boy-trolls’ self-loathing stemmed from not being desired by the pretty girl, perhaps the women’s came from not being the pretty girl.

One-two punch

In a one-two punch, the Depp trial had just finished up when the abortion ruling hit the headlines. The twinned events invited us to look at what happens to the sexes in a world of gross power imbalance, a form of injustice more ancient and omnipresent than any other.

Whether quotidian, like verbal harassment on the street, or homicidal, like the disappearance every year of a quarter of a million women, violent acts against half the human race by the other are so ingrained in the established order that they barely arouse notice.

The thousands of femicide victims in Mexico are not considered particularly newsworthy by the mainstream press, nor are the missing schoolgirls in Africa (Boko Haram, like many US evangelicals, are fine with young rape victims becoming involuntary reproductive vessels for men’s beliefs. The kidnappers aren’t Christian, but where female humanity is concerned there isn’t much difference between one Abrahamic fundamentalist and another.)

If we didn’t have five thousand years of normalization blinding us to the obvious, the fact that 80 percent of violent crimes are committed by men would incite such outrage as to spur draconian, gender-specific social reform.

Pandora’s box

But the obvious is becoming a little less blinding. The judicial removal of bodily autonomy from American women will make a whole range of abuses harder to ignore, justify, and normalize away.

Until it is corrected, the re-criminalization of abortion will cause tremendous harm. But it is likely to end up in the trash heap of obtuse historical blunders, like Prohibition in 1933. In both cases, self-styled moralists failed to read the room.

The anti-choicers managed their longterm strategy with formidable foresight, but it’s less clear that they thought through its ramifications. Legally, a chaos of state-vs-federal clashes has begun. Theologically, a boomerang effect is imminent, as non-Christian religions stake their claim to the existential right to define when life begins (in Florida, a synagogue has filed suit). Politically, voicing support for the ruling is likely to backfire on many an elected official whose constituents are opposed to it.

And it is re-energizing the women’s movement.

Only something this anachronistic could have done it. In calling attention to a worldview from a medieval sky-god religion, the Court has exposed how fundamentally weird misogyny is. Many people would doubtless keep on ignoring all kinds of social wrongs if they could, but the ruling will make it difficult to avoid confronting this one. It clashes too sharply with where people’s minds are in 2022.

You can almost hear Pluto chuckling in the wings, as a Pandora’s box of ugly truths now come swirling out.

Capricorn disrobed

Consciousness has a ripple effect. In this era of universal distress over climate change and its associated crises, a lot of people are recognizing that the mess we’re in has something to do with the gross imbalances of worldly power in general.

Capricorn, the dominant theme of our era, is the sign of hierarchical structures. When stressed, vertical stratification shows its destructive side, and we get powerless men who take it out on those beneath them on the social ladder. During the pandemic, domestic abuse figures skyrocketed.

An archetype follows the same rules whether it’s on the political, personal or deific level. The autocratic tyrant and the unemployed wife-beater are earthly versions of the father gods: Yahweh, Allah and Jehovah, the big, blunt-force daddies of myth.

But this is not about demonizing Capricorn. The cosmic lesson here is that we’ve allowed the archetype of top-down authority to get out of control. Nothing goes bad faster than excess. ⁽⁵⁾

Humanity is slowly – maddeningly slowly – taking this in. The phrase toxic masculinity has entered the popular lexicon. People are starting to talk about male supremacy as an epidemic social disease. An understanding of intersectionality is refining our perception of human oppression. Historians and environmentalists are linking the fossil fuel addiction of the industrial age with colonialism and structures of racial power.⁽⁶⁾

American devolution

How do we help the process along? If you’re a fan of consciousness, the burning question becomes how to respond, from a place of integrity, to these urgent times.

Astrology proposes we do so by living through our charts. The reason this works is because our personal make-up is an exact cosmic match with the time and place we inhabit. Even when the times are in the throes of Plutonian breakdown.

That one requires getting on board with some existential concepts. It requires an acceptance of the logic of regeneration, which, if it applies at all, applies across the board: to rotting apples, to human lifetimes, to decaying nations. Everything decomposes and then gets recomposed as something else.

In this sense the American devolution process is no different from a skin wound, which hurts and oozes at first, and then heals, naturally, with time. Whether we are personally alive to see the rebirth is an open question.

After Pluto leaves Capricorn it will enter Aquarius, and a new set of excesses will be exposed and released. And on and on it goes, purging and healing.

Maybe the times we live in don’t make any sense at all, that we can perceive. We may find this not-knowing unacceptable, unless we believe that we came to Earth to learn, not to already know.

Notes

1 Their hijacking of the Grand Old Party is so complete, by now, that many think of evangelicalism as American as apple pie. But until the 1970s the idea of separating church and state was taken quite seriously, and religion rarely made an appearance in American politics; any religion, any politics.

2  We might have already chucked the poor old term “liberal,” instead calling ourselves “progressive.” But that word, too, has devolved; it now means little more than being in favor of adding more letters to LGBTQ (an acronym affectionately referred to in Doonesbury as “that whole multi-vitamin scene”). Worse is the term “conservative,” which has come to mean the opposite of what it denotes: holding on to traditions that still function well (symbolized in astrology by the planet Saturn. Using this word to describe judges who gut climate regulation is a blasphemy to Saturn).

3  Matt Taibbi has written insightfully about the taboos that hold commercial television in check. Among them: It doesn’t report military contracting fraud stories; it doesn’t cover the on-the-ground results of Pentagon drone strikes; it seldom shows scenes of American poverty except as part of a police chase; and — especially tellingly, these days — it won’t touch stories about black Second Amendment advocates. To this list I would add its taboo against presenting politics in any way other than Democrats and Republicans.  

4  The bombshell took place under skies fired up by Mars (armaments), intensified by Jupiter, the planet that exaggerates whatever it touches — both in Aries (war), square the USA’s Cancer cluster.

5 This astrological law applies to every sign and every planet. Mars, the warrior planet, has a particularly noxious notoriety, but that isn’t Mars’ fault. It’s the fault of imbalance. Mars governs the human ego, which we all have one of, and we use it in healthy or unhealthy ways, based on our soul maturity. Although Mars may not dominate in the charts of individual men, it is the planet of men as a species and of the male principle in general, whose dominance over the past six thousand years has become skewed to the point of ecocide.

6  “Unless an intersectional climate movement succeeds in ending fossil fuel use and restructuring global energy systems, we may see authoritarian leaders leverage the crisis to consolidate power in increasingly dystopian scenarios.” — Andreas Malm, author of White Skin, Black Fuel.