Love and Pain

The Super Conjunction is about to be broadsided by the Goddess of Love and her consort.
As July opens, Venus will square the conjunction from Taurus to Aquarius. On the 6th, Mars will do the same, and on the 10th Jupiter and Neptune reach exactitude again. This puts our focus on relationships; with all the heat (Mars), attraction (Venus), pain (Chiron) and dreams of escape (Neptune) that relationships entail.

It was the Summer Solstice transits that paved the way for all this. Venus and Mars were together in the sky – in Taurus, no less – while the New Moon and Vesta were opposite Pluto: a situation loaded with the charge of sexual taboo. Now Venus and Mars are, one after another, going to pay a call on the triumvirate of grandiosity, illusions and wounds.

As a cautionary tale, this pattern expressed itself in the bizarre Lost-Weekend+ of Governor Mark Sanford. Here’s a guy whose utterly human drives burst out from behind his twee Southern-family-man exterior, making mincemeat out of the tightly wound persona that packaged him. Poor fellow. He heard that siren call and instead of stuffing his ears with wax, as Ulysses did, he jumped right in. He chose the Neptune option.

There’s going to be a tremendous energetic tension over the next couple of weeks between the personal and the transpersonal. The former will be represented by Venus and Mars, the duo of giving-to and taking-from others; the latter by those mysterious cravings symbolized by the Aquarius cluster. If we want to avoid pulling a Sanford, we might give a thought to what the highest way of playing out these transits might be.

How to honor our sensate selves in healthy, conscious ways; at the same time that we surrender to the unconscious drives that are guiding us to deep healing? How might we acknowledge both urges without giving up the manageability of our lives?

The best approach is to already know where we’re wounded (Chiron). The tragedy of these GOP sex scandals seems to be that these men have not confronted their hurt and need; instead they seem to have closeted them. This gives the deep psyche no alternative but to do something rash, such as compelling us to Argentina to play hooky and risk all for nookie. This syndrome is an expression of shadow Venus, Mars, Pluto, Vesta and the Moon (see my article in DayKeeper Journal) which clashed in the sky under which Sanford flew the coop.

The lesson behind all the Super Conjunction’s various expressions this year, behind all of the clashing juxtapositions of the known and unknown parts of ourselves, behind all the confusions and embarrassments that our human conflicts engender, is that of our shared condition. The dramas that will occur in July and ongoing, in bedrooms and boardrooms all over the world, are there to teach us about humanness (Aquarius). There is a universality to every human foible. Anticipating this will allow us to soften and deepen while we negotiate the sweet chaos of intimacy.

It takes humility (Neptune) to admit that we don't always know what to do with our desires (Mars & Venus); and humility is exactly what we're supposed to be learning. If we go into these next few weeks open-heartedly, our relationships will show us how to absorb, with grace and self-forgiveness, the overriding teaching of 2009: that we are all wounded (Chiron), we are all growing (Jupiter), and we are all children of the Universe (Neptune).

Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

Americans have trouble understanding that what comes up must come down. The collective entity that is the USA has Jupiter (inflation, increase) conjunct the Sun.

Everyone surely realizes, at this point, that what was happening before the housing bubble burst last fall was crazy and fraudulent; yet the media is still talking about “prices returning to normal.” What standard of normalcy are they referring to?

Where I live, the out-of-control upward spiral in housing prices dates only from the early 1980s; recently enough that I, for one, don’t think of it as “normal.” It was then that the concept of speculation real estate blew into town, replacing the previously normal concept -- of buying a house to live in and stay in.

The economy continues to unravel as Pluto wends its way back to the first degree of Capricorn, where it was in November. Things are going to get very dramatic as the Autumn Equinox approaches and Saturn begins its square to Pluto. I propose that we begin, now, to step back from the conventional wisdom about the economy. It’s not that there isn’t a crisis happening; it’s that the interpretations of the crisis that we’re getting from the talking heads need to be viewed with supreme caution.

When I’m listening to reports of a crisis, I like to know whose point of view I’m hearing. For example, a headline in yesterday’s paper read, “Median home prices rise in May – not clear if it’s good news.” I wondered, good news for whom? With the low rates and incentives now available for buyers, wouldn’t higher prices be bad news for the guy who never could’ve dreamed of buying a house before and now can?

And if the point of view reflected in the headline wasn’t that of Joe Homebuyer, whose point of view was it?

Pluto’s opposition to America’s Venus is offering us plenty of answers if we just ask the right questions. Pluto, the detective of the solar system, is heading towards its return in the US chart’s second house (money). If we want to know how the economy really works, all we have to do wait for Pluto to hand us clues.

Such as the fact that when the Dow falls, newspapers illustrate the event with photos of anguished stockbrokers on the trading floor. The inference we’re to draw is that something very bad happened; and that the Wall Street professional in the picture represents Everyman, reacting to that bad thing.

But what have we just learned about this guy on the trading floor? Is he really our alter ego? Is Wall Street’s reality the same as yours and mine?

One would have thought that September 2008 had made it egregiously clear that the financial industry and its agents do not share the same interests as ordinary citizens. During the presidential campaign politicians huffed and puffed about the difference between Wall Street and Main Street, exploiting the angry new populism that had exploded into being. Yet by buying into the media’s point of view, the public seems to be still not connecting the dots.

Why is it supposed to be of overweening interest to folks watching the evening news that the markets reacted this way or that way to Obama’s latest speech? Why are we persuaded that the most important thing about the GM bankruptcy is what the markets did when they heard the rumor?

I remember watching the stock quotes crawling across the bottom of the TV screen in the Spring of 2003 while newsmen were reporting the bombs falling on Baghdad. I thought, This is the most obscene juxtaposition I’ve ever seen. And yet, how perversely fitting.

Somebody was making big money off the war.

It was probably not you or me, but somebody was. I wouldn’t want to be in the karmic shoes of the death-mongers who were, that’s for sure. Yet why on Earth were the rest of us presumed to be more interested in the effect the invasion was having on the stock market than we were in the fate of the human beings being bombed?

Whose point of view was behind this morally bereft reportage?

The same line of inquiry might be applied to the bailouts and all the other sweetheart deals being made between Congress and the financial industry. It doesn’t take an economist to figure out why the Dow jumps for joy when Geithner pours hundreds of billions of dollars into the market. Or why Wall Street rallied after the defeat in the Senate of the Durbin bill, which would have protected homeowners from foreclosure. Or why the markets “respond so well” to the failure of all attempts to regulate the financial industry.

Is it a surprise that the banking industry approves of operations that benefit itself? The question is whether we, the public, will figure out what benefits us.

As Pluto in Capricorn is met by Uranus and Saturn in the Grand Cross upcoming, it becomes more and more important to recognize the forces at play in our world. It is time to make the distinction between the class of international elites (Pluto) and the rest of us (Uranus). One doesn't want to come off as polarizing (the latest accusatory term --replacing "politically correct" -- deployed to intimidate social critics), but the bald truth is that 40% of the world’s wealth is owned by 1% of the global adult population. So let's define "the rest of us" as the remaining 99%.

The Rest of Us does not include those agencies for whom American wars create windfall profits; e.g. contractors like KBR, who have reaped nearly $32 billion since 2001. Nor the billionaire bondholders who are getting stealth payments, even as we speak, while the economy tanks. Nor the CEOs who make an unbelievable 275 times the amount of money that the workers in their industries make. Nor the G20 powers, assembling in Olympian summits to divvy up global financial control.

The Rest of Us means the people of the world, symbolized by Uranus in valiant Aries. Time to know the players and pledge our allegiance accordingly.

Boom

Mercury, Mars and Venus are now in Taurus. This is the sign that governs things of worth. In the American mind, this archetype translates, simplistically and emphatically, as money.

Meanwhile, Pluto (destruction) is still almost exactly opposed to the US Venus (values). The country as a collective intelligence is confronting some very ugly truths about its use of resources.

Photo by "David van der Mark"

What has seemed normal for decades is now looking perverse.


From the cosmic perspective, this is a healthy thing. It’s as natural as feeling nauseous after eating something toxic. Pluto governs vomiting and other functions too unsavory to delineate in polite company.
We may find it humiliating to admit that what we have ingested has made us sick; but this planet’s job is to get the poisons out, and that’s what it is doing. America has made itself bilious with what it has consumed.

And Saturn is on the Sun in the chart of California.

“There’s not a minute of the day when I don’t think about [the impact of budget cuts on the poor],” said Arnold S., California’s governor. Tan and tailored, he looked good saying it. He was appearing outside the Capitol promoting a $56,000 electric Hummer. Some might have questioned his choice of contexts for making his declaration of empathy for the little people.

He never was a very good actor.

How fitting it is that California, with its grotesqueries and marvels, elected this larger-than-life character as governor. And how appropriate that California is epitomizing the country’s outsized economic problems. Schwarzenegger is presiding over a financial meltdown of Armageddon-like proportions. Dispensing valiant bromides in his accented English, he is now playing the real-world role for which his Terminator movies seem to have prepared him. He is the do-or-die tough guy in a landscape of wreckage.

His karma has put him in charge of the golden state’s dilapidated dreams.

The state has a 24+-billion-dollar shortfall. Its Republican legislators have made a deal amongst themselves to not raise a single tax to rectify the situation. Given that these lawmakers are state residents like the rest of us, you’d think that the decimation of public services that their stand makes necessary would cause them to think twice about it. But then you realize that they don’t really live in the same state.

Their children do not number among the million whose health care will be taken away. Their teenagers won’t be affected by the sudden absence of grants for low-income college students. The UC system, once the jewel in the crown of American public education, will now have its public funding cut down to the bone; cost-wise it might as well be private now. But I imagine the political class will continue to send their kids’ tuition payments to wherever they would have sent them before. Secure in their jobs so long as they stick to their lobbyists’ demands, they doubtless feel themselves to be personally immune to these changes.

Not so their constituents. Ordinary citizens will feel the brutal cuts. And the non-wealthy GOP faithful who voted for these guys will feel the devastation every bit as much as those who didn’t.

There are lots of Republican voters in California. A few miles from the coastal urban centers live plenty of red-blooded, tax-hatin’, working-class citizens. Another thing the threadbare budget will eliminate is rehab for prisoners; but I’m guessing a lot of inland folks have no problem with that. Not just because their party seems to favor the lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key approach to crime; but because there are a lot of prison boom towns in the state.

Actually, mostly what we have is would-be boom towns. And we have even more former boom towns, thrown up overnight and abandoned almost as fast. Such as the housing developments -- complete with school, church and grocery store -- erected by the feds in the 1950s to house workers for the aerospace industry (see Joan Didion’s Where I Was From).

Forty years later, small-town Californians were persuaded that a shiny new prison would provide their dusty burgs with jobs for all. Thinking with one’s wallet instead of with one’s brain is popular in tough times. I can understand how the humongous American prison population might feel less like a curse than a blessing to unemployed folks in the Central Valley. If you were lucky, maybe the developers and their lawmaker friends would pick your neighborhood as the site for a gargantuan correctional facility (now there’s a phrase that deserves the Double-Whammy Euphemism prize).

Still, despite their shared abhorrence for taxes, between these voters and the legislators who represent them one cannot help but notice a rather large demographic difference. Although the gentlemen being chauffeured to their offices in Sacramento probably won’t notice the closings of homeless clinics, their constituents will. Those without a roof over their heads will notice, of course, and so will those who use the streets and subways where the homeless will now sleep.

Eighty per cent of California’s parks are to be closed (the sum of money to be thereby saved is estimated to be less than what was spent on the Governor’s special election last month). But I’m guessing that a lot of these public servants, with their six-figure salaries, probably have houses with trees around them; and will not be overly traumatized by the park closures.

California is the über-American state. Its booms have been spectacular, and spectacularly undemocratic. Palm trees, mansions and oligarchs grow bigger here. From its railroad barons and dot-com baby billionaries to its lenders who divvied out mortgages like potato chips, California’s booms are crazy-bigger; and its dreams die harder.

With the planet of adulthood daring California to grow up, the state’s agonies are poignantly instructive right now. Once again it is holding up a mirror for the nation to face itself. And we are realizing our values have been all upside down.

The Surrealism of Size

Most of us have the sense that something big is happening in the world right now. What’s going on in the sky certainly spells this out, especially the part about Neptune (universality) conjoining Jupiter (expansiveness). But a closer look at the meaning of this pair suggests that this Big Something we feel happening is more than big.

It’s a different kind of big.

Neptune (surrealism) and Jupiter (size) are easing into their spectacular first conjunction the end of this week. Gradually, subtly, underneath the surface of mass consciousness, a sea change is occurring in the public mind. A very ordinary concept -- one closely tied to the literal, everyday world -- is becoming extraordinary: the notion of quantity. It is slipping out of reach.

Take the “several trillion dollars” that are being given to the banks. (Not a literal offer. You can't take them. Only huge financial institutions can take them.) It’s too much money to imagine. Can your brain make sense of even a billion dollars?

(Okay, this part may be just me. I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that over the past few decades, maybe since the dot-com boom, the term “millionaire” to mean “a really rich person” has been replaced in the vernacular by “billionaire”.)

These numbers have too many zeroes to fathom. They are the stuff of science fiction (Neptune). If humans are born with a special brain zone that can process “several trillion dollars,” I haven’t found mine. I put the phrase in quotation marks because I haven’t been convinced that it refers to something real. At the moment it remains an abstraction; the kind of sum that theoretical mathematicians alone can handle.

The premier symptom of the transit of Neptune (confusion) over the Sibly Moon (the American people) is the fact that the US populace is staggering around in a daze while their national treasury is being emptied out. Naomi Klein has called this process “the greatest heist in monetary history.” Over the centuries there have been plenty of official rip-offs, far less outrageous than this one, that have spurred populist uprisings. Yet there are no murmurs of revolution here (outside of a few nut jobs on the radio, whose rants are motivated not by ideas but by the fact that their team lost the big game last November). In the face of the gargantuan bailouts still taking place, the passivity of the victims -- the taxpayers -- is hard to make sense of unless we factor in that the collective mind has slammed up against an epistemological wall.

We know that thinking precedes action. It certainly precedes political action. The Neptune/Jupiter/Chiron cluster in Aquarius (We-the-People) that dominates the sky all through 2009 offers us a big clue as to why and where America’s collective consciousness is stuck.

In Britain, they’ve just fired the speaker of the House of Commons for the first time in 300 years for not preventing the legislators from spending a few thousand quid on garden manure. Here in the USA the kleptocrats who destroyed the global economy are being punished with the gift of hundreds of billions of dollars. No strings attached.

Americans are not responding intelligently, intuitively, or self-interestedly to the heist in Washington because the mass mind has blown a fuse.

Deceit on Capitol Hill

The transit of the year is coming to a head. As the Aquarius conjunction gears up for its peak (May 27th through the 31st) on the US Moon, Americans find themselves contemplating an ethical controversy of the classic American type. Illogic mixed with outraged bluster is creating a tempest of feigned righteousness. Is Pelosi lying, or is the CIA lying?

Propelled into the headlines just as the planet of deceit (Neptune) meets up with the planet of morality and law (Jupiter), at issue is the infliction of hideous harm (Chiron) upon incarcerees. Right on schedule, the transit has ushered into mass consciousness a national debate about inhumanity and lies.

Slugging it out on center stage are Nancy Pelosi and her GOP antagonists. This woman is fierce, and fiercely resented (aren’t Aries females always keenly resented by a certain type of man?). With the media spotlight upon her, she is meeting head-on the old frauds who have had it in for her since day one.

As ever in these sorts of media spectacles, the attacks and counter-attacks we are hearing are at once bombastic and ridiculously inconsistent. But for observers of cultural symbolism they are very telling, offering up several layers to parse.

At first blush, the dust-up would seem to be about the fact that heinous crimes were committed; crimes which tainted the reputation of a people who had believed themselves to be made of better fiber. On a second level, the argument seems to center around whether the repugnant actions in question were and are technically legal. But where we are hearing the loudest brouhaha is on a third level: that of partisan one-up-manship; with the Speaker of the House being made the focus of a how-much-did-she-know-and-when-did-she-know-it firestorm.

Leave it to the American media to take an issue as starkly odious as torture and obscure it with round-the-clock coverage of banal political backbiting. As presented by the corporate news, the focus of interest here is not torture itself, but the supposed irresponsibility of a scrappy political player who doubtless knew exactly what her enemies in the reining party were doing.

What will history remember about this episode of deceit on Capitol Hill? My guess is that it will not concern itself with whether Nancy Pelosi lied about her awareness of the torture Bush condoned.

I imagine future students of this American era will marvel at the deafening absence of outrage from the public: outrage towards those Congressmen whose party held power at the time the atrocities were committed; outrage towards the now safely-retired villains who signed off on them from the Oval Office; and outrage towards the perps themselves, who would doubtless explain themselves as having been "just following orders" when they strapped their victims to the waterboards.

It seems to surprise no one that the CIA and the Pentagon, the agencies that orchestrated the torture, are not being subpoenaed to offer up names. I think one reason for this is that the postmillennial CIA, somehow credited with “keeping America safe from terrorists” when in fact the opposite is the case, has been recast as a patriotic institution, off-limits to scrutiny and blame.

Another is the confusion that exists in the popular imagination between the glamorous spy-as-cultural-icon and the real thing.

Both supporters and detractors of these agencies understand that unspeakably inhumane activities are part of the spook’s job description. Far from expecting CIA agents to be held accountable as individuals, the public clearly feels that part of the gig’s cachet is that we don’t know their names. In this context it was utterly consistent that Americans seemed to take more umbrage at Cheney’s outing of Valerie Plame than at any of his other despicable ethical breaches.

Wow. You know, I remember when the CIA was considered evil. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Hollywood would’ve no more made their hero a CIA agent than they would’ve made him a Nazi.

James Bond was big in those days, but he was British. For American audiences, that put him at enough of a remove to make it safe to get off on his violence and sexism as one would get off on an over-the-top cartoon. Like the Indian-killing cowboy in that earlier cinematic genre that overlooked its own genocidal subtext, Bond was heroic in the sense that gadget-enhanced homicide set the standard for cinematic coolness.

James Bond movies featured expensive European suits and ejector car seats, seeming to set them in a different universe from the real spooks, who, as were just finding out in the 1970s, conducted dirty wars in Latin America. It didn’t strike Americans as contradictory to thrill to a movie spy’s cosmopolitan antics while simultaneously condemning the US spy agency that assassinated Salvador Allende.

Meanwhile, the CIA has been rebranded. Its operatives are now considered sympathetic enough to play the lead in action movies. Unlike James Bond, these sleek new murderer-heroes are written as serious characters; one is supposed to root for them. Like Mafiosi, CIA agents have been dubbed by the makers of popular fiction as suitable role models for the young males in the audience and as heart throbs for the gals. Fresh-faced young actors like Matt Damon are cast to play them.

While it is true that Bush’s preëmptive strike against Saddam Hussein made some Americans a little uncomfortable, killing sovereign heads of state and orchestrating coups is now considered to be basically okay; at least in the movies. So long as it isn’t our head of state; and so long as the coups are in impoverished Third World nations.

One keeps hearing what a nice man Leon Panetta is, the new head of the CIA. The fact that he is loath to offend either Democrats or Republicans is portrayed as the most important thing about him. In the he-said-she-said melodrama taking place under these Neptunian skies, scant mention is made of the fact that the CIA lies as part of its job.

Let’s Make Him Do It

Everybody’s talking nice about greening the economic recovery (if “recovery” is the right word for the ongoing suicide of free-market capitalism).

At the recent G20 summit in London there was plenty of lip service paid to emissions trading to reduce greenhouse gases. The trouble is, several of the signatory governments are getting cold feet; Uncle Sam being a notable example. Plenty of heavy industries were exempted from paying for carbon-trading permits; most permits ended up being granted for free. Why is this? Unsurprisingly, it is because these countries’ domestic industries started to exert their formidable power.

Time to invoke Uranus, a.k.a. Power of the People.

The Uranus-Saturn opposition is still active up there in the sky; its next exactitude is on 9/15/09, and its last one is on 7/26/10. This is the transit that spells out the tug-of-war between We-the-People and The Powers-That-Be. It suggests that when issues of the common good are on the table, the inspiration for change -- as well as the follow-through -- has to come from, well, us. If we want a green planet, ordinary people, not agencies or governments in league with big money, are going to have to make it happen.

I think we all know this. I doubt that there is anyone who believes that the captains of industry who’ve been making billions off planetary desecration for centuries are going to stop of their own accord. I don’t imagine there are any magazine readers out there who infer from Chevron’s glossy double-page we’re-saving-the-Earth ads that these gentlemen have had a change of heart. Or who think that because the Exxon Valdez changed its name to The SeaRiver Mediterranean (!), their karma from committing the most notorious oil spill in environmental history has been wiped clean.

Moreover, over the past year, political naïveté in the USA has been dealt a major blow. Americans are reluctantly waking up to the fact that their chosen representatives, no matter which side of the aisle they sit on, are quite uniformly beholden to the Big brothers: Big Oil, Big Agra and/or Big Auto. Not to mention the most ecocidal Big Brother of them all, the one you never hear mentioned in discussions of ecological or economic reform: the Defense Department.

The economic meltdown has had only one effect that qualifies as thoroughly bi-partisan: disillusionment (Neptune/Chiron/Jupiter on the US Moon). Angry Republicans and earnest liberals alike have grown hip to the fact that their country’s financial system has been gamed and gutted. And observers from both camps have been shocked – shocked! –to hear that the looting was aided and abetted by their very own congresspersons; most egregiously, by those who quietly passed laws during the Clinton administration that redefined what the lending industry was doing. That is, they legally re-branded felonies as cool new trading practices.

Among Democrats, even the most stalwart party faithful must surely realize that career politicians have no incentive to orchestrate deep-structure reform. Remember all the hoopla surrounding the Democratic sweep three Novembers ago? Exultant voters allowed themselves to believe that, finally, the “liberal” party would use their new power to stop Bush’s war. Didn’t happen.

Still isn’t happening.

Obamaphiles have given their hero a lot of slack. That’s fine; he deserves it. Big job, big problems. But at some point even his most ardent fans are going to have to ditch the president-as-all-knowing-father trip and exchange it for a systemic point of view.

We need to replace the mass media’s version of “politics” – a football game between two teams wearing different-colored shirts – with an understanding of the real forces that wield power in American society. In contrast with these forces, the chief executive plays a relatively minor and largely symbolic role.

There are enormous shifts of consciousness assaulting the American mass intelligence right now. Ideally, these would include a new realism about the factors that actually, not theoretically, create our national policies: the power of money (Pluto), the power of stasis and fear (Saturn) and the power of large numbers of people insisting on a new, improved scheme of things (Uranus).

Meanwhile, the globe is under duress. Scientists worldwide forecast that sea levels will rise for centuries even if greenhouse gas emissions are halted immediately. Most of the European signatories aren’t meeting their Kyoto targets and, astonishingly, are building new coal plants instead. At the G20 summit, the European Union, happy for an excuse to stall, claimed they were waiting for a climate-change commitment from Washington before they could make their next move.

There is a lot of talk about Washington playing the leadership role in turning global warming around. But Obama is walking a tightrope. According to a Gallup Poll, right now Americans are more worried about money than about the environment. The GOP is loving this, of course: they get a lot of traction from fear. “Middle-of-the-road” Democrats (whom Jim Hightower dismissed with the great line: “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but a dead armadillo”) are pandering to their spooked bases, too, with the despicable lie that going green will send the country to the poorhouse.

In Copenhagen this December there’s going to be another big climate summit, where our esteemed world leaders are all going to try to agree on a new Kyoto-type protocol. Who’s going to get Obama’s mouth and actions to work together? We are. If it’s going to happen, it has to be us.

FDR was once approached by a supporter asking him to commit to a cause they both knew was just. The practical old player replied, “I agree with you. Now make me do it.”

Animal Farm

“Smithfield Farms.” The name invokes green pastures, happy cows and sweet pink pigs milling around under a blue sky in Pennsylvania or Kansas.

But it is in La Gloria, Veracruz, Mexico that we find the “Smithfield Farms” plant associated with the first case of Swine Flu. The four-year-old boy who is believed to be its ground-zero victim lives near the plant (it would be a stretch to refer to this operation as a “farm,”according to reader Georgeann Johnson, a resident of Mexico who has written about the issue). The child’s family had been petitioning the government for years about the nauseating stench, the flies blackening the air above pools of pig feces, the hundreds of residents sickened by heretofore un-researched and unnamed ailments. But only now that the mass media has latched onto swine flu as its latest Big Story has anybody paid attention.

Can you imagine living near such a place? Can you imagine working at such a place? Can you imagine being raised and slaughtered at such a place?

For those observers who see these societal dramas as cosmically meaningful, this is one more instance of a soul-sick culture unraveling before our eyes. The factory farm issue has found its poster child.

The environmental movement has gone internal. With luminaries like Berkeley’s Alice Waters having forged the way, people are realizing that there’s a connection between what we do to the Earth and what we do to our bodies. It has been 8 years since Eric Schlosser wrote Fast Food Nation; locavorism is now gaining traction; the White House has a kitchen garden and McDonald’s has a salad bar. And for ever-larger numbers of people, the inhumanities to which we subject the animals we eat -- fellow sentient beings – are becoming more and more intolerable.

As suggested by the astounding array of planetary transits now amassing in the sky, we are in a time of massive consciousness raising. We are being hit by revelations, one after the other, about the horrors that have been standard operating procedure during our lifetimes. We are asking questions we never asked before. Is there any more gratifying reason to be alive, than to witness people connecting dots like this?

But the truths are ugly. That’s a given. Pluto is moving towards an exact opposition to the US Jupiter (international affairs), indicating exposes about the indignities inflicted by America’s government and corporations upon other nations. Jupiter is conjunct the Sun in the USA natal chart, offering a further hint of Uncle Sam’s tendency to ship its dirty work abroad. The sign under the spotlight right now is Cancer, which governs farms and food.

Add factory farms to the list that includes rendition, the Pentagon’s practice of sending detainees to be tortured in “less enlightened” regimes (among these: the desperately impoverished and dysfunctional states of the former Soviet Bloc, and the brutal, essentially medieval kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Egypt). And, of course, manufacturing -- outsourced to India, Southeast Asia or wherever else starvation wages and substandard working conditions are allowed.

Americans familiar with the wily ways of NAFTA will not be surprised to hear that the little patch of hell-on-Earth in La Gloria Mexico is an outsourcing deal. As American-sounding as apple pie, “Smithfield Farms” (I can’t write it without quotation marks; we must do what we can to make their branding strategy backfire on them) is the largest industrial farm factory of pork and beef in the world. Johnson told me about Laura Carlsen, a policy analyst for ciponline.org, who has been tracking NAFTA’s push to get industrial livestock farms into Mexico, in what insiders call a “race to the bottom;” i.e. the Third World–- a hideously apt term for a witheringly cynical campaign. American corporations know that if they move these abominations into the Mexican countryside they are unlikely to be bothered by pesky environmental and health restrictions.

But the swine flu story got the tale told. Here we have a case of the mass media serving as a tool of the cosmos. With their echo-chamber reporting of what is dubiously being called a “pandemic”, our blow-dried brothers and sisters on the network news, hired to fear-monger as a means of boosting their stations' ratings, are inadvertently raking up the muck about this vile industry. Interest is being stoked, research is being done, articles are being written. Reports are coming out about the vicious circle of pathology that dominates factory farming; such as the ever-increasing amounts of antibiotics the animals are pumped full of, which enables them to survive – in the short term -- the increasingly virulent viruses created under the conditions of places like “Smithfield Farms.”

As you know if you, too, grew up in the 1950s, there used to be so little public consciousness about the environment that ecology (the word didn’t exist then, and neither did the concept) meant little more than picking up litter. As children, many of us felt a terrible unnamed distress about the desecration the human animal was wreaking upon the Earth; but there was no movement to join. We had no way to express our intuitions; we had no context for our angst.

Those days seem prehistoric now. Let us see this as a testament to how far we have come.