It always struck me as so quintessentially American, that Pottery Barn metaphor that Colin Powell and Thomas Friedman chose to refer to Iraq: “You break it, you own it”. I wonder whether a public speaker elsewhere in the world would have made this same point by invoking a less explicitly commercial image. Such as, say, a mother saying to her child,
I do not have the stars-and-stripes flapping in the breeze this Spring evening. I don’t have my “We’re Number One” teeshirt on. I’m not giddy with jubilation about my country shooting Osama bin Laden in the face.
President Obama claims that “justice was done;” seeming to gloss over the associations the word justice has with charges, public trials, evidence and so on. Does it matter, if we flout international laws by sending killers to off people on foreign soil?
It’s that time again. Soon the American airwaves will be bristling with round-the-clock coverage of the 2012 campaigns.
Ambitious candidates are getting ready to hit the ground running, with their staffs of strategists, chauffeurs and stylists. TV executives and advertisers are licking their chops at the guaranteed spike in viewership, as they prepare to spend a year and a half convincing the public that nothing exists in this big, wide, troubled world outside of the American presidential election.
It happened on the very day Uranus (shocks, shattering) moved into Aries. On March 11th, the tectonic plates under the Pacific Ocean buckled and northeastern Japan was devastated by the biggest quake-tsunami in its recorded history. At this writing the peril of nuclear reactor meltdown looms as the most far-reaching of the quake’s attendant dangers.
The confetti had barely been swept up in town squares all over the world after the triumph in Egypt. The American public was distracted elsewhere, trying to find a job, or keep a job. And suddenly we were in another war.
Word was buzzing around the blogosphere that a post-March 11th natural disaster was likely
This month we’ll get a cosmic lesson about leakage (Neptune), making me wonder whether the ongoing saga of WikiLeaks will take another turn. The explosive (Uranus) and taboo (Pluto) nature of this juicy international (Jupiter) drama has made Julian Assange a major star, which is what happens when somebody is plugged into the world moment.
As we will see, Assange is a Uranus-Neptune-Pluto figure. Natally and by transit, he represents the disruptive and uncontainable energies of the three outer planets, all of which threaten the status quo (Saturn). The relationship between these three archetypes is hinted at by their placement in the solar system: Uranus, Neptune and Pluto all orbit beyond Saturn, the planet of law and order. Saturn governs that which is in-bounds; the planets beyond
Sometimes feeling overwhelmed is a good sign. Under skies like these, to feel overwhelmed means we’re not shut down. Personally and globally, late July and early August should raise urgent questions in all of us. The Full Moon on 7/25th and the New Moon on August 9th (see the lecture series announcement in the right-hand column) are bookends to an explosive two weeks.
There was an earthquake last night here in San Francisco. It felt like the Earth was shuddering from the violence
Native Son (For Part Two, click here.) There are ways of looking at this appalling presidency that have nothing to do with politics per
Beyond Incredulity It’s hard, isn’t it? watching Trump’s most vicious fans on the march, righteous and emboldened. It is painful in
