By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
We’re still swimming in a sea of Pisces energy. Neptune-flavored, where facts seem to come and go, reason seems elusive, and reality slips and slides just when we think we’ve got a good hold. You can’t beat Neptune when it comes to oddities, shimmering illusions and bizarre moments. It seemed for a while there that we were standing on firmer ground, but then everything went out of focus and there was Dennis Rodman on television, telling me that he’d had a nice sit down with L’il Kim’s boy, Kim Jong Un, and all the newest Kim really wanted was “a call from Obama.”
Rodman’s visit coincided with the UN vote for tightened sanctions against North Korea — even agreed upon by the long-suffering Chinese who remain Pyongyang’s lifeline for vital supplies — due to Kim’s ambitious schedule of nuclear tests (and threats against the U.S.). In a rage, young Kim nullified the 1953 armistice with South Korea and cancelled all non-aggression pacts. Still, war-plans aside, Dennis and the newest little dictator, the one the natives call “respected general,” really hit it off, a truly odd couple. Clearly, the Mad Hatter is still popping up when we least expect it, dormouse in his pocket, laughing like a loon.
So it wasn’t quite so much a shock to hear that dearly-departed Hugo Chavez will be embalmed and put on permanent display, like Roy Rogers’ famous palomino, Trigger (stuffed and viewed at Roy’s museum until recently auctioned at Christie’s for a quarter-mil.) Perhaps this is a cultural thing I don’t grok in fullness, just a bit too weird for me to contemplate.
I simply can’t imagine taking the kids to see Hugo lying in a glass vault like Snow White awaiting the prince’s kiss, but South America typically deals with the dead much more viscerally than its Northern neighbors. Word is this is a thinly-veiled attempt to keep the emotional ties to a much-beloved Chavez alive in the Venezuelan proletariat. (Still, when visiting the Lincoln Memorial, I think we can be glad that all our forebears approved was a statue.)
Serendipity in such moments deflected us away from the economic realities of sequester and the hard-edged conservative rhetoric of this moment, working the nerves of all but the thick-skinned. The entry of Mars into Aries this coming week may bring the Baggers’ intentions to a boil or explode them into steam. We shall see. I think some warmth may be welcome. Perhaps a dose of fire, precursor to the equinox later in the month as spring knocks on our door (remember to change your clocks this weekend!) will put a little pep in our step, blow away the cobwebs of a sleepy winter season and get our blood moving.
It DOES feel like we’ve slept over-long, doesn’t it? Like we’re dragging our feet, past ready to jump up and grab the moment? Doesn’t it feel as if we’ve got our fingers on the pulse of it, a clear view of the cause of our problems, the public no longer dozing through the thick smoke of willful obstruction and disinformation? Voices seem joined in push-back against the factions that serve the plutocracy. Real proposals to settle serious problems seem just out of sight, off in the wings, examples of actual movement-politics demanded by citizens who will no longer allow themselves to be played like violins. Feels so close, so close …
And yet, so far. Surrealistic news that the DOW went higher than ever before caused FOX News to jiggle with joy while the rest of the nation scratched its head and murmured, “WTF?” Republicans everywhere logged onto E-Trade to get the deal of the day, while those keeping their head just above water basked in a moment’s hope that the rally would make breathing easier. Others, deep underwater divers on the economic scale, just shrugged. What can be said about the yawning chasm between the very rich and the rest?
Once, when the middle class was made of cast iron, that chasm was not of much concern, since ‘the rest’ was comprised of the very poor and disenfranchised. Now, the rest means, essentially, everybody but the 1%. With almost fifty percent of Americans struggling to keep their lives going, take-home pay flat-lined for decades, and the hidden fees of privatization and deregulation eating us alive, there are some facts we just can’t avoid thinking about. And more than just hand-wringing, we need to understand that we can no longer tolerate them. One of the most glaring is the income disparity that is ripping democracy apart.
A startling video on pay and wealth inequality went viral this week for good reason. If you haven’t seen it — a clear illustration of the economic woes we’re suffering — take a peek (and your bonus-gift at this Kos link is a fiercely accurate George Carlin YouTube; enjoy.) An extraordinary divergence between the haves and the have nots is occurring even as worker productivity has never been higher (nor CEO pay for that matter, estimated at as much as 380 times that of the average employee.) To complicate matters, there are more people living in poverty today than there were, for instance, in 1959, prior to Johnson’s famous War on Poverty that split the politics of the nation then, as now.
Poverty should concern us. Half of our recent college grads can’t find full-time jobs, and many of them are still living with parents. Meanwhile, a full two-thirds of Americans over the age of 65 depend on their Social Security check as at least half, if not all, of their income, while a new MIT study shows 46 percent of senior citizens in the United States have less than $10,000 in financial assets when they die. Meanwhile, union participation is at an all-time low, right-to-work legislation has passed in 24 states, leaving workers largely unprotected, and the middle class is anemic unto catatonia. This seems a highly unlikely time to gather in the safety nets and let the citizenry tumble, yet that’s exactly what’s being proposed.
Now, let’s face it: we’re pretty schizophrenic about money. I’m sure you’ve noticed. We often think of money as we do work: we think we ARE what we do. When we’re finally ready to mature past that elemental misperception, it damn near takes an exorcism to banish those old tapes from our brain and emotional body. Same with money. We think we are what we earn, that we need to “work hard” for it and will be judged by what we have. We think we’re nothing without it, that it reflects our worth, our intellect, even our spirituality, and most importantly, our deservedness.
Without money we’re nothing. With it, we’re better than all those other ‘nothings’ who don’t have any. Clearly, such rhetoric is a dreadful wickedness of low-level mental/emotional programming, the worst of dysfunctional 3D thought forms, feeding our false self and looping our ego in competition. This is the “root of all evil” the Bible warns about — not the money itself, which is only a form of energy, but the LOVE of it, which is covetous, competitive and selfish. Or, to quote Charles Koch, “I want my fair share — and that’s ALL OF IT!”
Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s good economic news and what’s not. Take the most recent unemployment numbers. They’ve eased a bit for some job hunters, sending overall numbers below 8 percent, which is good news. Closer to the bone, however, lack of work seems to have solidified for the 40% of jobless Americans who are chronically unemployed. And the voices projecting a continued and steady climb in employment must now spit in the eye of the sequester, poised to decimate the supply chain as it eliminates 3 million Meals on Wheels, puts 775,000 women and children off the WIC roles and closes down 173 airport control towers, wounding medium-sized airports and small-town economies; and that’s just for starters. 700,000 jobs are at risk, and government — America’s largest employer — continues to bleed jobs at about 10,000 a month, most of them teachers and service-oriented civil servants. Cutting vital programs doesn’t just hurt recipients, it wounds the entire nation.
Over on the left side of the spectrum, you’ll find some people intent on turning that around. For instance, staring down the stringent cuts of the sequester — which is nothing more than a self-inflicted wound — John Conyers has introduced a bill called the Cancel the Sequester Act of 2013. It’s an escape clause, simple enough, stating only, “Section 251A of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 is repealed.” Wouldn’t you think that would get some traction? (If you approve that legislation, you can encourage your leadership to sign on here.)
The Republican plan to eliminate “entitlements,” cut by crucial cut, is on parade these days, strutting its stuff without its usual mask of pretense. Supposed moderates, Simpson and Bowles, have shown their true colors, coming out of the woodwork to propose giving away more of our safety net, and a re-energized Paul Ryan is once again proposing cutting the budget to whittle Social Security and Medicare down to splinters. In response, Senators Bernie Sanders and Harry Reid have co-sponsored legislation to strengthen Social Security — Oregon’s Peter DeFazio introducing a companion bill in the House — without raising the retirement age or lowering benefits. Here’s Sanders on the topic, a real populist champion, with an obvious, common sense fix:
Social Security is the most successful government program in our nation’s history. Through good times and bad, Social Security has paid out every benefit owed to every eligible American. The most effective way to strengthen Social Security for the future is to eliminate the cap on the payroll tax on income above $250,000 so millionaires and billionaires pay the same share as everyone else.
Rep. Alan Grayson has suggested a bill to cover sequester expenses by finally ending the war in Afghanistan. Two birds with one stone. Perhaps that would ease our anxiety, like that of the man pictured on HuffPost yesterday, holding a sign reading, “Due to recent budget cuts, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.”
Yes, here, as our long Winter finally slips into Spring, there are alternatives being proposed, progressive voices being raised. We’re tracking glimmers of common sense, as when Elizabeth Warren went after Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement this week that some banks are still too big to fail. Paul Krugman’s voice is becoming a serious counterpoint to the austerity meme; his disapproval of conservatives’ stringent economic solutions was recently echoed by 350 economists, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The Progressive Caucus is challenging conservative talking points and at least so far, Obama seems unwilling to be the first to blink on a “deal.”
We may still feel a bit groggy yet from Winter, a bit underwater with our various challenges and worries, but this is the very time that we have to plant our feet firmly and stand for what’s right, what’s ethical and compassionate, what’s in the common good. If we aren’t willing to do our share, maybe even more, we can anticipate the loss of more jobs and growth, more unnecessary suffering for ourselves and those we love. Choices are coming clear, here in the first year of a new era. The choices can’t be more stark, nor our need more obvious to stand up — and not just for ourselves — against the possibility of a coming chill of enforced deprivation.
The Republicans have already gotten trillions off the debt for their 600+ billion in revenue. What they’ve done with sequester has wounded us all, and they’ve congratulated themselves for making the nation bleed. They’ll want more and more, ever more until there is nothing left to offer. They’ve come this far, they won’t stop now. We don’t have to give it to them. Remember, long after you’ve read this; remember, because it’s true. This is a contrived emergency, a planned crisis, a blood-letting that the public has been snookered into. None of it is necessary, neither is it a done deal. What happens next is ours to choose but we must do it, together — active participants in our own future.
Cold cash is very powerful, addictive, compelling — but not as powerful as a warm and caring heart. While we can appreciate both, there is one we simply can’t do without. If we have not yet figured out which one that is, then here’s our opportunity to discover what’s real and lasting. This week, we have a dharmic moment to ease our way: Monday’s new Moon conjuncting Luna and the Sun in Pisces, flush with the seminal energy of an exalted Venus. Seems to me, of all the potent planets out there — even the Big Scaries like Pluto and Uranus — Venus is the one that carries humanity’s lodestone for positive change. She is the planet of love, the holy elixir that can ease all pain, heal all wounds, re-create us.
The love of money is a very poor substitute for the real thing. Some say real freedom lies not in having so much you can afford a gated community to protect it, but in having little left to lose. If so, a lot of us are there. Yet love isn’t something we have, it’s something we ARE. We have it to invest, to lavish on others, to give away, and the more we give, the more it grows. We have it to bank, to revel in, to depend on, a never-ending supply of creative juice. There is more than enough of everything on this planet, but understanding the enormity of that truth takes a loving heart. Opening our heart chakra is a life-changer. Opening our minds is the first step.
Conjoined with the Pisces Sun and Moon, and squared to push us toward our authenticity, Venus is inviting us to bring our best to the party: our best intention, our highest thought-process, our most cherished values. The old way left a lot of us outside, looking in. We can’t begin again, leaving anyone out in the cold.
Bygones for slow response, dearhearts, I was exposed to a virus last week and Saturday morning I awoke with no voice, a chest full of gunk and NO energy to process the day. I’m slightly better today … writing this in fits and starts … but wanted to jump in to thank you for your kind comments.
GaryB, bless you for that last paragraph, you made me mist up! As a movie buff, I’ve always thought “The Grapes of Wrath” joined a handful of classics that were almost too harsh, too heartbreaking, to watch, but it illustrated, as did Ma’s speech, a truth about humanity that cannot go ignored; regardless of the [variations on] class war that civilization insists upon. It also showed us a brilliant and early Hank Fonda — Tom Joad on the run — who immortalized these lines:
“Maybe it’s like Casey says. A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big soul, the one big soul out there that belongs to everybody. And then it don’t matter. Then I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere…Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad, and I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready … And when our people eat the stuff they raise, and the houses they build, I’ll be there too.”
That about covers my entire philosophy of life: “A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big soul, the one big soul out there that belongs to everybody.” Thanks for reminding me! Oh, and by the way — I call bullshit on:
“Johnson has justified his method, saying, ‘ I thought the politics were secondary to the story of the Joads.’”
The story of the Joad’s IS politics, bloody and mean.
Lighter story: back in the early 70’s, the old abandoned sardine canneries in Monterey had been all but forgotten but the waterfront was determined to make a comeback. There was a movement to make little boutique’s out of some of the store-fronts, so tourists began to show up on the wharf. Some hippy’s rented out one of the canneries, filled it with bean bags, hung a sheet and sold tickets to “Tortilla Flats” [1942, Spencer Tracy, John Garfield and Hedy Lamaar, about the canneries.] We’d lay in the bean bags, in the dark, transported into a less complicated past and, eventually, some faceless someone in the dark would hand over a doobie; you’d take a hit and pass it on. The experience was pure San Joaquin Green (you had to be there,) but as punctuated by Steinbeck’s affection for unwashed humanity, it captured the zeitgeist of that tumultuous moment.
NOBODY handled character like Steinbeck; nobody scratched off the dirt and grime of hard-times to reveal the tender bits of heart as did he. My favorite is “Cannery Row.” Doc and Dora, Mac and Hazel are alive in my mind, always will be.
I do see our parallels to the 20′ and 30’s, the Dust Bowl, the migrations in the economic echoes around us. Those times prompted FDR to meet his destiny as a visionary, and laid the foundation for the Great Society. These are different times though, and it occurs to me that Big Money strongly objected to Roosevelt and his policies but had not yet tasted the loss of political power authored by a strong middle class: they seem to have learned their lesson well, now determined to not repeat the same mistake.
Thanks, as ever, be, for your comments. I really appreciate your tracking all the Venus energy ahead — that’s very reassuring. None of us can be surprised that what comes next will take our “whole heart.” We’re in process of gathering it now.
And I liked the “lion and lamb” reference, as well. Some are being very cynical about Obama’s “charm offensive,” but old saw’s are usually true and nobody can argue that, “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” It’s overdue. Resident-regressive, Paul Ryan, told news he’d never really had a conversation with the Prez before he was invited to lunch last week. Bless Obama for doing what he so-obviously doesn’t like to do [and who can blame him!]
The one thing Rand’s filibuster did was start a conversation that was having trouble getting lift-off. The conversation has to come first, even if both sides seem unwilling to flex. Let’s not forget that “the cliff” and “the sequester” are not the only dire economic deadlines we face; there’s a whole string of them ahead. Unless we’re willing to have that conversation, begin to engage the topic, if not agree, we can’t begin to break the inaction-vacuum. NOT pretty.
Maria, I’m glad you found something here to help ward off the emotional-slime that comes with the daily grind. I wish I had further energy for that conversation because separating out joy from illusion is a critical reminder for all of us, but for now, I’ll just add that what others think of us … our circumstance, our appearance, our life-style, our accomplishment … means NOTHING unless we give our power away to it. That becomes clearer as we practice — as you included in your piece today, last paragraph — the ability to step away from lies told to us, or that we tell ourselves. REAL incidents of joy absolutely REEK with love-energy; no substitutes allowed!
An early tele-guru, Terry Cole Whitaker, wrote a book whose title sez it best: “What You Think Of Me Is None Of My Business.” Amen and amen!
Going back to bed now, bless you all for your generous comments and thoughts.
thank you for giving me some juju to deflect the “low level mental/emotional programming”–8-12 hours of it daily!–that tells me (and others struggling with work and bills) that I have no value. my guys always tell me that love has more value. the blues and soul music i like has the same message: if the world is bringing you down, come to me, i have the love you need. if it worked for someone trying to keep it together in mississippi in the 1960s, who am i to say it won’t work for my simple troubles?
I think of Flagellants (as opposed to flatulence) when you talk of “a self-inflicted wound”; not that they don’t have something in common. Yes, they both stink, but they both reflect a functional disorder that most likely could be fixed with some common-sense changes; either in thinking habits or eating habits. Bravo for Alan Grayson, Bernie Sanders and Peter DeFazio for their easily digested examples of how to fix self-inflicted wounds such as the Sequester act.
I really like your description of Venus Jude; she “carries humanity’s lodestone for positive change.” You know, trans. Venus joined her own higher octave, trans. Neptune just a few days before the day she sextiled Pluto, trined Saturn and joined up with Mercury in Pisces; the same day that the President dined with the 12 Republicans. Now there’s a good example of flagellants meets flatulence. Still it was the divinely inspired Venus carrying her lodestone for positive change that allowed the lamb to lay down with the lions. What greater magnetic draw could be worn than this protective and beautiful amulet of Love? As all the personal planets have passed over trans. Neptune they too have been bathed in Universal Love. The essence of this quality will be tested for endurance as the planets cross over into the conscious world of Aries in the days to come.
It should give us reassurance that trans. Neptune, now in a long water trine to the U.S. Venus in Cancer will gradually move to make trine to the U.S. Jupiter where he will station and then retrograde back to the U.S. Venus for a total of 7 months of infused peace and love (or madness) for this country. In either case, Neptune will back off for a couple of months but return around Christmas time to once again conjunct the U.S. Venus then the U.S. Jupiter, and by this time next year, move on for good.
During that time, transiting Jupiter in Cancer will have made a conjunction to the U.S. Venus, Jupiter and Sun, as well as trining trans. Neptune and Saturn. Once maybe not being enough, Jupiter will repeat in retrograde the trine to trans. Saturn and the U.S. Sun, and finally in direct fashion conjunct the U.S. Sun (3rd times the charm), move forward to trine transiting Saturn in Scorpio (3rd time), and conjunct the U.S. Mercury (one and only time) in June 2014.
Meanwhile, Pluto will have been in an exact opposition to the U.S. Sun for 100 days by early June 2014. Transiting Uranus will have wreaked havoc for 18 of those days as he squares them both, then moving forward he will oppose the U.S. Saturn for 21 days. These will be days of wailing and moaning, perhaps some flagellating in the Capitol City, but this too will “pass”. And return again.
Only a loving heart can believe that truth and understanding will change a closed mind. And that it takes time. Trust Saturn to give us that patience as he stays the course of Scorpio through mid September 2015. After that he will move slowly forward in Sagittarius until he reaches the U.S. Sibly ascendant, shortly after Pluto’s last transit opposite the U.S. Sun.
be
Another excerpt from the link: http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/easyrider/data/Film_Book.htm
The film’s political implications were muted because the film-makers feared criticism. In the scene where Farmer Thomas warns Tom and the Wallaces about the impending raid on the Government Camp, the recurring question of ‘red’ agitation comes up again. Tom, who has heard the argument before, bursts out, ‘ What is these reds anyway?’ Originally, according to the script, Wilkie Wallace was to have answered, rubbing his own line from the novel, that according to a fruit grower he knew once, a red is anyone who ‘ wants thirty cents an hour when I’m payin’ twenty-five.’ In the final print, however, Farmer Thomas answers Tom’s question simply but evasively , ‘ I ain’t talkin’ about that one way ‘r another’, and goes on to warn the men about the raid.
Since scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson was a conservative Southerner, it was only natural that he de-emphasized Steinbeck’s specific left-wing arguments . Johnson has justified his method, saying, ‘ I thought the politics were secondary to the story of the Joads.’
Thanks Judith,
Upon reading your article I reflected back to my favorite author John Steinbeck’s classic “The Grapes of Wrath” and the current underpinnings of the world. The following is a discussion of the different endings of the novel and the Darryl Zanuck film.
The different endings:
“Another difference between novel and film are the different endings: while the novel ends with Rose of Sharon giving her breast to a starving stranger in a barn, a scene that has very often been criticized, the movie ends with the Joads leaving the security of the government camp, but in the tone of an upbeat all the way. The movie finally ends with Ma’s famous ‘We’re the people’ speech. Thus the movie ends without the destructive flood, without the symbolic stillbirth, and without the final gesture of universal love. The audience leaves this movie moved and comforted, but not, as Steinbeck must have wished, provoked.
The sense of impending change, enormous change, which swells toward the end of Steinbeck’s novel, simply can not be found in the film.
Comparison of Ma Joad’s ‘ We’re the people’ speech in the novel and in the film
Ma’s speech in the novel
‘ Man , he lives in jerks – baby born an’ a man dies, an’ that’s a jerk – gets a farm an’ loses his farm, an’ that’s a jerk. Woman, it’s all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain’t gonna die out. People is goin’ on – changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.’
The novel does not end with this speech. After Ma’s speech Rosasharn’s baby is stillborn and the Joads have to take shelter from the flood in a barn.
Ma’s speech in the film
‘ For a while it looked as though we was beat. Good and beat. Looked like we didn’t have nobody in the whole wide world but enemies. […] Like we was lost and nobody cared. […] Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, an’ they die out. But we keep a-comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out. They can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.’
The movie ends with this speech as ‘Red River Valley’ strikes up in the background.
Zanuck himself decided to flesh out and highlight the now-famous ‘We’re the people’ speech by Ma Joad by placing its optimistic survival message at the end of the film.
The implications of this final speech are that there will always be rich and poor, aristocrats and peasants, but that the aristocrats will rise, dissipate themselves and disappear, while the peasants will keep trudging down a long, hard road.
The Grapes of Wrath as a novel argues that in order to survive spiritually and physically on the planet man must commit himself to man and environment, whereas the film version focuses on the traditional figure of the isolated individual who will make things ‘right’ “.
In either ending if Ma Joad doesn’t bring some emotion…well then.
It has and continues to be a series of jerks… Thanks Judith for being our Ma Joad!