While citizens of every other country in the world can see our Government’s intentions as plain as day, in America the latest official story continues to fool far too many who should know better. For this we can thank a mainstream media that legitimizes each new red herring as fast as Washington can concoct it.  At this writing, with all memory of the torturous international haggling that led up to shock-and-awe apparently forgotten, the pretense has slithered into place that’s it’s always really been about the will of the Iraqi people.

 

The stark reality is that the will of the Iraqi people is indeed being expressed, right now, for all but the blind to see: in brutal violence against the American occupiers and their collaborators. Were the American public to take even the briefest break from the mainstream news and its parroting of White House nonsense, common sense might creep back into the war debate; prompting them to concede that natives of an occupied region are probably  going to want the occupiers out of their country so badly that they'd be willing to die to achieve it. 

 

Despite Washington’s current spin that the bloodbath stems from inter-tribal conflict, a minimal familiarity with history tells us that desperate civil violence always and everywhere accompanies military occupation. The daily suicide attacks in Iraq -- a historically secular country whose deposed president, Saddam Hussein, was a sworn enemy of Osama bin Laden -- are a nationalistic statement, not a religious one.  These self-martyring acts, so foreign to the  American mind that it is a wonder more thoughtful analysis is not given to them, give voice to the current sentiments of the Iraqi people through the only means Washington has left them.

 

Meanwhile, the democracy charade monopolizes the conversation across the gamut of  American media  --”left” and “right” -- and real news about Iraq gets harder and harder to find. While the tabloids compete with each other for the most heartwarming photos of smiling, ink-stained Iraqi voters, and while even such thoughtful publications as The New Yorker solemnly analyze “this experiment in democracy” being attributed to Baghdad’s risibly half-hearted puppet government, the horror of the war and the dark engines which motivate it continue apace.

 

Collective nervous breakdown
The American psyche is in sad shape, as Pluto (planet of breakdown) in the USA’s first house (of identity) makes clear. America’s national consciousness has diverged into two disparate streams:

1.       the idealized story about why the USA is in Iraq (and rattling sabres at Iran, Syria and Korea), which dominates discussion on the surface; and

2.       the appalling truth of what’s actually going on, which courses beneath the surface.

 

Those in the first camp, who purport to believe the Government’s version of things, are living in a soul-sapping suspension of belief. The cynics and dissenters in the second camp, meanwhile, suffer the hardship of disempowerment.  And America as a whole stumbles along in a state of massive dissociation.

 

If America were an individual, right now she would be diagnosed as schizophrenic.

 

Staying sane

To maintain our personal psychic health in this atmosphere, Americans must ground themselves in the realities that underlie the hue and cry from both sides of the political spectrum. The opportunity is upon us to reassert ourselves as individuals: staying informed, but refusing to allow the propaganda to frame the terms of debate.

 

Terms of debate

Right now, to engage in the national discourse is to hear pundits wasting time debating such faux-issues as, for example, which countries Iraq’s “foreign fighters” are coming from. Few observers are taking note of the fact that the current division of much of the Middle East dates from the treaty of Versailles in 1919, when boundaries were changed to facilitate the colonial powers' management of their colonies. (Control of much of the Ottoman Empire was divided between France and Britain, although Arabia remained independent.  Lloyd George famously rejected Syria, because it had no oil. He said that the French could have it; he preferred Iraq.) The Western media virtually ignores the Arab perspective, which is that Iraq is one of the historical centers of the Arab world. 

 

Meanwhile, bold updates on the Michael Jackson trial, in the US, nudged the war reporting from the headlines; and Halliburton et al continue to raid the killing fields with impunity. An embattled and outnumbered US military stacks up casualties by the thousands. And when every few months the Pentagon requests more blood money, Congress throws more billions into the death pit, reassuring their constituents that they are taking a stand for democracy.

 

Democracy redefined

Iraq is not the only example of Washington tossing around the term democracy in a way that suggests they have never looked it up in the dictionary.  Judging by the American Government’s actions over the past few decades, for them to use democracy to sell their Project for the New American Century is to take hypocrisy into the far reaches of surrealism.

 

Good countries

None of the governments on Washington’s Good Countries List has anything akin to democracy going on. Pakistan's record on women’s rights, terrorism, corruption and drugs is abysmal. Saudi Arabia’s judiciary deals with petty criminals by chopping off their hands; they stone women for adultery.  Wretched, abandoned Afghanistan, with its Abu Ghraib-style detention camps and its heroin crop that has quadrupled since the American invasion, is the most recent graduate of Bush et al’s beneficent democratization program.

 

Even if one stretched the term democracy to its most implausible inclusivity, it would be hard to find states less democratic than these recipients of Washington’s friendship and billions in aid. 

 

Doublespeak

The story Washington is churning out about “the march of democracy” is not merely a distortion of truth. Just as Orwell predicted, this story is the opposite of truth. 

 

Over the past fifty years, the handful of places in the world that have actually managed, despite lethal superpower interference, to establish populist, autonomous governments -- such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile and Haiti -- have had their revolutions toppled one by one by counter-revolutionaries funded by Washington.

 

The American public once heard the truth about these coups years later (Allende); now we follow along in real time (Aristide, Chavez). What has changed is the blatancy of American policies designed to undermine governments that refuse to kowtow to Washington. American leaders no longer pretend to be disinterested in foreign elections; the CIA’s presence in the Ukraine was blandly announced recently as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Overseeing and orchestrating regime-changes globally is being spun as evidence of Washington’s great support of democracy.

 

Putting the Uranus back in democracy

The more we consider the true meaning of the system of government to which this word refers, the more disturbing it becomes to hear its name taken in vain this way. In order to honor the Uranian roots of democracy, we must celebrate and encourage the human desire for freedom from oppression, and support all those bold movements worldwide which attempt to champion the individual voice.

 

As always, we must start where we are. If one lives in America, one must look at what America is doing.  To say one has a  government of, by and for the people means taking responsibility for how one’s employees in office are running it.

 

As repellent as many of us find the current administration in Washington to be, the metaphysical view is that each of us incarnated into a given location for reasons which have as precise a meaning as the day and time we were born. That there is a direct karma between person and nation is further illustrated by the fact that an American citizen’s money pays the salaries of these insane public servants, and sponsors their violent acts. These men and their lethal machines quite literally belong to the American people.

 

As conscious beings trying to become more conscious, we have choice on multiple levels. Just as we choose (or not) to confront the Shadow places within ourselves, we choose (or not) to confront the shadow places in the groups to which we belong.

 

Confronting would mean shaking off denial about the monstrosities that continue hourly in Iraq, especially in those areas where resistance (Uranus) to the occupation is most dedicated. And especially at night. Our forces stage most of their bombing raids at night, a tactic learned from the Israeli military in Palestine -- the better to psychologically destabilize the target populace. This despicable practice is the very definition of terrorism. These are crimes against humanity, and they must be named before they can be rectified.

 

As we look more closely at the meaning of Uranus and its placement in each of our natal charts, let us consider anew the noble ideal so close to the heart of the modern world. Let us take a moment to imagine the cultural shift that would occur if we all stood up for a democracy seen not through the brittle distortion of cynicism nor through the haze of sentimentality, but through the bold, clear lens of Uranus.

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Jessica’s telephone number is +1 415 626 7795 and her email address is jessica@MotherSky.com. Her Web Site is www.MotherSky.com.