Enola Gay, is mother proud of little boy today
Aha this kiss you give, its never ever gonna fade away…
–OMD (live) and studio version with archival footage. Interview with the crew of the Enola Gay.
Dear Friend and Reader:
TODAY WE COME to a somber point in the year — the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is one of our traditions at Planet Waves to acknowledge these events, which are typically treated as if they never happened. [Please see our cover photo here, of the Atomic Bomb Memorial in Hiroshima.] We Americans have good reason to ignore them: they are among the worst atrocities committed by human beings, and our nation was responsible. They were committed even as we were cleaning up from the Allies’ triumph over Hitler, whose crime was the mass extermination of populations.
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Scarcely three months after the last concentration camps in Germany and Poland were liberated, an airplane called the Enola Gay set across the Pacific with the first atomic bomb that would be used on a foreign population. Previous bombs were tested over the southwestern United States through the 1940s, and more than 100 in total over the US itself. Countless American civilians, GIs, small children, farm animals and vast swaths of land were exposed to radioactive fallout.
What happened on Aug. 6, 1945 was different. An American plane, codenamed Mother and piloted by Paul Tibbets, dropped a bomb, codenamed the Little Boy, on a “virgin target” — a city unscathed by the war between Japan and the US that had raged the past four years. He named the airplane after his own mother. This is an astonishing bit of history that we need to psychoanalyze a little more often.
From what I have read, we dropped the bomb on a fresh target rather than a damaged one for scientific purposes: to see precisely what the bomb could do to an actual civilization. Three days later, on Aug. 9, another plane delivered a bomb to the city of Nagasaki. I will not attempt to quote estimates of the dead. The number does not matter. What matters more is that to this day people are still suffering the effects of the radiation, mainly through multi-generational effects such as genetically-induced cancers. We may wonder if an injury like this inflicted to a society can ever really heal, to the victim or the attacker.
If you consider yourself a sensitive, intelligent person, I encourage you to gain (or at least attempt) an understanding of this for yourself. The easiest, most direct way to begin that process is to rent a documentary film called The Atomic Cafe. It was made, incidentally, by Michael Moore’s film mentor, Kevin Rafferty, a cousin of the Bush family. He collaborated with two other directors, Jayne Loader and his brother Pierce Rafferty, and the project took five years to complete. I suggest you watch this film sober. It is just too much to watch under the influence of any substance. It reveals the mass psychology, delusion and psychosis of the development of the bomb and the so-called Cold War era.
Let’s take a look at the chart. This chart is actually worth a book, but I will offer several observations on both the major planets and the small ones.
— Virgo is rising, suggesting the methodical nature of the attack. Years of research and development of the bomb preceded its first use. Mercury, the ruler of the ascendant, is in the 12th house of secret missions, secret enemies and the shadow side of human nature. The Bomb is the shadow side of Virgo: the opposite of service, and the dark interior of what we nonchalantly call “science.”
— The Moon is in Cancer, and it’s exactly conjunct Saturn. I consider this the thumb print of the chart. It is as cold as ice. The Moon and Saturn are near the North Node, which reflects and establishes the direction the world would take for the next untold number of decades. This is an almost ironic expression of the dark mother imagery depicted in the choice of code names for the project — Mother and Little Boy. Need I note that this is a parody on Christianity so sick one could vomit.
— Venus is square Chiron. A lot of people on the American side got really, really emotionally high off of this event. More people were killed in one instant than any time before in known history, and for a lot of so-called scientists and government bureaucrats it was like huffing shoe polish. The problem was they needed the next high, and that’s not usually as interesting — in this case it turned out to be Nagasaki and then the endless proliferation of nuclear weaponry.
— Eris is opposite Neptune. Like most Neptune aspects, I am having difficulty translating this into words. But there is something deeply delusional about this aspect, with the goddess of discord and the patron of the postmodern age facing into the haze of Neptune.
— The Nuclear Axis is taking important transits from Mars and Uranus. The axis, which stretches across early-to-mid Gemini/Sagittarius, was defined in the chart for the first atomic reaction, in December of 1942.
— The closest minor points to the ascendant are Amor, Cupido and Photographica — two that deal with love, and one that is typically involved with the making of images. We put a loving face on the mass incineration of a city; we committed murder and called it good. For the most part, we still do. Just ask around.
Yours and truly,
Today’s Oracle takes us to the Saggitarius weekly of Sept. 6, 2001
(The Oracle is a random daily selection from among 10,000 horoscopes written by Eric Francis)
It’s now time to get aggressive on a financial matter that is associated with a creative venture. The value of this project just went up. You may not have seen it on the stock market update, but it actually happened. Part of why its value increased is a matter of timing: You were forced by factors outside your control to wait, and you did, and now you become a kind of beneficiary of circumstance — and of your own patience, work and ideas.
Tuesday 05 August 2008
Sun (13+ Leo) semisquare Hades (28+ Gemini)
Apollo (29+ Leo) conjunct Orcus (29+ Leo)
Mercury (19+ Leo) conjunct Eros (19+ Leo)
Venus (28+ Leo) trine Pluto (28+ Sagittarius Rx)
Amor (6+ Gemini) quincunx Hidalgo (6+ Scorpio)
Venus (29+ Leo) conjunct Orcus (29+ Leo)
Apollo (29+ Leo) sesquiquadrate Jupiter (14+ Capricorn Rx)
Venus (29+ Leo) sesquiquadrate Jupiter (14+ Capricorn Rx)
Venus (29+ Leo) conjunct Apollo (29+ Leo)
Arachne (14+ Libra) quintile Galactic Center (26+ Sagittarius)
Ceres (23+ Cancer) square 1992 QB1 (23+ Aries Rx)
Mars (21+ Virgo) trine Sedna (21+ Taurus)
Sisyphus (16+ Libra) quintile Pluto (28+ Sagittarius Rx)
Atlantis (23+ Libra) trine Neptune (23+ Aquarius Rx)
Sun (13+ Leo) sesquiquadrate Pluto (28+ Sagittarius Rx)
Mercury (21+ Leo) square Sedna (21+ Taurus)
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
— John 3:16, King James version
The Bible verse (New Testament) popularly quoted by Christian missionaries/evangelists and which forms the foundation of fundamentalist Christianity.
I never saw the connection before, and now it’s so obvious, as is so much nowadays. What a powerful, wonderful time this is .. “aha” moments every day, open doors and windows, fresh air. In the midst of such confusion and delusion, there is such clarity. Thanks, Eric.
Thank you, Eric. This chart is truly deserving of a book of it’s own. Great post.
Tachikata – good point. Listen to that Truman tape if you can (it’s in Atomic Cafe, too)…if I recall, the reference to God is only in the audio, not in the written statement…
Chiron is in a dual position – the 1st house, but the second sign from the ascendant (2nd house in whole sign houses). It is really both. So we get the usual themes of “existential struggle” (1st house) and “self esteem injury” and “crisis over what we really value” (2nd house) – but does that explain it? For sure, after the Bomb was used, the culture shifted to an accepted value on death over life. I think that the square to Venus is telling, and the presence of Venus and Chiron aspecting the Aries Point. This feels like a values crisis in mass culture, with Venus and Libra involved…riffing a little on Libra, we always have the theme of aesthetics – how “beautiful” it is (Libra was rising when the World Trade Center was hit, and it possessed a distinct aesthetic quality; the towers falling had a certain elegance. We see the same thing in those mushroom clouds – they seem beautiful. And yet what we are seeing is hundreds of thousands of lives going up in radioactive smoke. I would sum up the whole Chiron configuration as, “You call this beautiful?”
How would you interprete the Chiron in the 1st house? Is it indicative of the wound that was inflicted due to this attack or the wound that possibly led to the attack or both?
I didn’t blame it on Christianity, I am reading the symbols – my job as an interpreter of symbols. Christianity can be looked at two ways, a cult of the mother and child, or a death cult of the crucified Christ. I believe my actual text above says that it’s a “parody on Christianity.” However, the joke is on us – it was Truman himself, a Christian, who told the American public that God told him to do it…and that is on tape.