For an American journalist, or perhaps just speaking for myself, the loss of Keith Olberman on the nightly news is the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up. What is amazing is in part that an Olbermann, whose analysis not only critiqued the global power system but dismantled it for everyone to see, existed; what is more amazing is that he could be the top-rated show on a major cable network. If there were about a million a night watching him, that tells you there are a heck of a lot of wide-awake people and many more on the way. That’s what he meant when he said he was more amazed by his audience than they were by him.
Olbermann announced last night that it was his last edition of Countdown, after a nearly eight-year run. NBC ended the contract; that’s basically how Keith put it in a brief farewell to his viewers. The decision coincides with the recent federal approval of Comcast partnering with NBC-Universal. Its current and transitioning-out parent company is General Electric, purveyors of light bulbs, missile parts and toxic global misery (radiation, dioxin, PCBs, yadda). I was impressed that a bastion of integrity grew up in its house, but sometimes that’s how it is: narrow, conservative parents producing a great artist for a child.
Comcast has issued a stark denial that it had nothing to do with the decision, and that it had promised not to influence the news divisions of NBC. Perhaps that may be true — but what other statement would its publicists approve? So when there is just one possibility given, it’s a good idea to look at the others.
One thing to consider is that NBC is notoriously bad to its top talent, whether we’re talking Conan or Phil Donohue. They don’t seem to care about popularity; you have to hand it to them for being so boldly individualistic, or perhaps stupid.
Looking at just one chart — the announcement that Friday’s was the last program — one of the main clues that a relationship is about to change is that Jupiter (the ruler of the 7th house of relationships) is about to change signs, from Pisces to Aries. By whole sign houses, it goes from the 7th house of relationships to the 8th house of transformation. So a relationship is on the brink of change. The thing about the 7th is that it would be the ruler of the corporate parents (the ‘other’ in the relationship) and the ingress into the 8th has a feeling of corporations and lots of resources changing hands, which is an inherent meaning of the 8th.
Right near the cusp (properly, the peak) of that 8th house, in late Aries, is Eris — which in mythology is about the unleashing of chaos and to me is about the chaos of the Western identity crisis, so profoundly mingled with corporate memes. How many people proudly wear Nike hats and shirts not only to be part of the club but to provide themselves with some sense of identity in the world? There are nightclubs in Paris you can’t get into without the right brands of apparel. The brand becomes the product and the identity. This is an unexamined sickness, with its roots in tribalism, that we really need to look at, so we can take back that energy and do something creative with it.
The ascendant being Virgo, its ruler is Mercury in Capricorn — that’s a perfect depiction of Keith. This is in the 5th house (that is, the 5th sign from the ascendant), conjunct Pallas: creative, dynamic (both 5th house matters), deeply traditional (Capricorn) and strongly inclined to politics, protection and justice (conjunct Pallas). Mercury is strong in this chart, and it’s trine the ascendant. It describes someone at his creative and intellectual peak. Indeed, that 5th house into the 6th (factoring all of Aquarius as the 6th sign from the ascendant) are packed with potential, ideas and the willingness to take risks. There is an Aquarian-styled passion in this chart that is emblematic of Olbermann himself, who incarnates Aquarius at its most dynamic, open-minded and gutsy.
What is most ominous about this chart is an aspect that’s invisible in most astrology programs: it starts with Pholus, that energy of popping the cork and letting the genie out of the bottle, on the 4th house cusp: the homeland, the security base, the end of the matter; about to be conjoined by Venus. Pholus, if you recall, also showed up angular in the chart of the mass shooting in Tucson two weeks ago today. It’s not always a negative influence; it’s a structural one, representing something that changes and cannot change back — it can only change forward, and that process has to be carefully watched, felt and understood for what it is.
Part of what we need to see and understand and indeed feel is what it means to have physical and in many ways psychic reality colonized by corporate entities, branding, imagery and ideas that are merely designed to sell more at the expense of everything else. This is not the loss of ‘reality’ but rather the consumption of self. Olbermann’s fans were the awake and the awakening; you had to be, to tolerate the stark, gutsy view of the world he presented, though often with a sense of humor, and always with style and historical grounding.
Part of our problem in the world now is that we neither appreciate, nor know much about, even the recent past. That meeting of Venus and Pholus, in the 4th house of past matters, says something really weird — the past is changing faster than we know. That is, perhaps, an opportunity to let go of a lot that we don’t need and don’t want. But it’s a warning to stay grounded, literally to keep our feet on the Earth and remember we live on a planet and not in cyberspace or a fantasy game. Being grounded leaves plenty of room for creativity and imagination. Those things are not the problems. Our society’s delusions are.
As a friend wrote on my Facebook page last night, Olbermann’s “often acerbic attitude would grind even the most tolerant of corporate heads but, I always took it as an expression of how ‘over’ he was with all the manipulations, skewings, political lip service B.S. from what we used to know as news has become. He stood for what couldn’t be spoon fed to mainstream America. You listened to Keith because you were ready to wake up and pay attention.”
From what I have read, the terms of his exit bar him from being on a competing channel for a while; that’s more or less normal. But we have not heard the last of Keith Olbermann. I will leave you with one of his messages, from about a year ago, that must have sent chills down the spines of those corporate chiefs, and the members of our corporatist political machine. It involves the Citizens United vs FEC decision that was handed down by the Roberts Supreme Court last winter.
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I will merely add my thanks to Keith Olberman for having the courage to speak the words that so many of us have been positing for so long. A breath of fresh air!! I am confident that the future see a prominent return of this outstanding orator!!
Keith will land on both feet quite well. Of that I have no doubt.
Tremendous delivery of both the news and an astrology education. Thank you, Eric.
The middle ground being, a little dioxin is okay…just not too much.
The Left … The Right … and The Wrong
I have been lucky enough to see all sides of the economic stratosphere in my life. East London in the 1980s was still a home to down and outs who lived in cardboard boxes and sucked the very life out of you as you passed by. I remember one woman in particular who grabbed me around the wrist and locked her hand so tight that I was being perambulated at her pleasure. Her skin was ice cold and I could feel my body temperature falling as I struggled to disengage myself from this vampire who basically had nothing to lose!
Travelling to West Africa in 1995 was another lesson in how the poor and the damaged in our societies are generally ignored. I used to visit a local supermarket regularly, and as soon as one particular vagrant had assimilated the information that I was shopping at least twice a week at a particular time, he was there waiting with the usual greeting “I am your king.” A ripped tee shirt and soiled shorts were his only attire, and the rest of the world just carried on as if he was invisible, ignoring his begging, his hunger and his threatening insanity!
Then there are the playgrounds of Barbados and the Caribbean; the 25 million dollar yachts in the Mediterranean marinas of the moneyed class; the newly built Palm trees across acres of islands and race tracks in Dubai, Qatar, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain. There are stories of governments and their wives who have been caught with their pants down! Another billion dollars is stashed in an off shore account; another prostitute with a kiss and tell story; another silent witness, and latterly another gun crime by an unstable student of the political rhetoric that seems to suggest that the stakes are so high that if you can get away with the heist and get your nose out of the trough without being caught, then you really are a winner! Baby Doc Duvalier, having followed through on his father’s regime of voodoo, mass sacrifice and terrorism, has returned to Haiti and is genuinely surprised that he maybe held to account. Ah mean ….Ah played the game…. Ah looted the national economy…Ah am a mass murderer… what the hell!! Last week the wife of the president of Tunisia, having woken up in her whorehouse and noticing that her husband had fled, was allowed to take a convoy of 50 vehicles to the bank and loot 1.5 billion dollars of gold that is rightly the property of the people and their economy!
So I get to thinking about the middle ground; the silent majority; the stable core voters who make up that middle ground in any democracy. We voted for the Left, and they turned out to be so economically inept that the national debt reached pandemic proportions! We voted for the Right, and lo and behold they cut back on all of the social programmes that the Left had spent so much money on, and then gave the banks and all of the moneyed class even more tax breaks, and free parking at their favourite “lets bash the poor and kick ‘em when they’re down” mausoleum! Yet that middle ground core vote continues to pay ridiculous prices for food, fuel, clothing and anything that a good socialist economy would provide at basic cost! Is it apathy, ignorance, a lily livered backbone or just plain stupid; or indeed all of these?
I have been living and working in the UK for 2 years having spent the previous 3 years in West Africa. If the Gambia was a culture shock and steep learning curve, the return to the UK has been a confrontation of epic proportions. I spend some hours each week doing consultancy work, marketing in the Solar Energy industry. I believe in the ethics, the principle, the product and the necessity to provide an alternative to fossil fuels. It also gives me the chance to talk on a daily basis to a complete cross section of the population, and I have to say that the results are revealing in a way that I never would have imagined.
The behaviour of the poor, the ignored, the ignorant, those whose shot at education was denied, the new money whose arrogance knows no bounds, the old money whose attitudes are 13th century feudal aristocratic at best and the recent immigration of Eastern Europeans searching for the dream, would seem to suggest that there is in fact no middle ground core vote left!
Pluto was conjunct Uranus in the 1960s. This unleashed a fundamental energy change into our society and our culture that cannot be stopped. You can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube. We had explosions of cultural expression, theatre groups, great rock music, empathy with each other and a vision for the future ( I do believe they laughed at the mention of the word Greenpeace). There was a standing joke in the 1970s that all of the hippies were now working for the local council. They were economically sand bagged, blindsided and marginalized into being completely ineffectual. The Thatcheriser ( sorry Lady Thatcher of Grantham corner shop) followed swiftly on and proceeded to show everybody that greed and selfishness were not only good, but also created an attitude that would leave your neighbour dead and his wife your servant! Cogito Ergo Ego Sum … I think that’s great therefore my ego is unsurpassable and fuck you and the community!
So now we have the approaching first quarter of the Pluto … Uranus story…a square in early Capricorn and Aries soon come. It is as if we are getting a first school report on how all of our dreams as manifest in 1966-69 have made it through to mainstream life as we know it. The result is worse than disappointing; it is the worst kind of Shakespearian tragedy. The tragic we can live with; shit happens! But a tragedy, an act of gross stupidity based on all of the most basic drives of men and women, is just too absurd to contemplate.
While African Americans, particularly in the U.S.A., have led the way in progressing the realisation of Dr King’s dream, there has been absolutely no progress whatsoever in the American and European white middle class. While successive Marxist governments in Africa have led the way in educating their children, nurturing the ever more important relationship with China and the East, and generally producing attitude scales that create cultural innovation and solidarity among ethnic groups, the waspish white Anglo Saxon protestant/catholic self serving core voting middle class have become notorious for their selfishness, greed, holier than thou proselytising, corruption, stupidity and tunnel vision that got us into at least two world wars in the first place.
Today I spent the morning talking to a sample group of residents of villages in Northamptonshire UK. One particular village is owned, and is indeed part of the estate of Earl Spencer, the brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales. After the usual pleasantries one is engaged in a discourse about Solar energy. Imagine my surprise and disbelief to discover that these particular residents are not even allowed to have television aerials on their roofs, let alone Solar panels. At the first intoxicating whiff of feudalistic 13th century aristocratic colonial posturing, I was engaged! Conversation followed conversation and my disbelief slowly turned to shock and generally distaste. They not only, as a core voting middle class wholeheartedly supported this crass stupidity, but dismissed Solar energy with outright conviction and belief in their own omnipotent membership of some long lost fossil fuelled civilisation that takes no account of anybody from a lower caste, lower tribe or lower stairs position!
Middle England! I have tonight…as Jupiter moves into Aries for the first time since its last ingress on the 13.02 1999…thought long and hard about what the incumbent attitudes and self-serving, colonialist, ghost-ridden, empire-seeking, resource-stealing, world domination programmes have done to our DNA. Eris is indeed about to reek havoc with the identity that we as nations and individuals cling to at the expense of truth! Then as the fragmentation unleashes the Uranian and Plutonic power burst, is it any wonder that the middle class is beginning to eat itself?.
As I sit and listen to Piers Morgan and George Clooney talking about spy-in-the-sky cameras set up to try to avoid the genocide that will be the fall-out from the vote in Southern Sudan, it really is time to say to that spineless pack of morons who make up the silent majority, the core voting middle class, the wealth seeking, cap tilting, need for approval white trash that has made a mess of every country it ever colonised… Fuck You! You are wrong! You were always wrong! Lets cut the crap! The oil is a fossil. Its running out. Clean and green is the future. Work it! Get your head out from up your ass! Join the human party!
The dignity that I have experienced in West Africa…. from the Marxist civil servant who was a room mate of Eldridge Cleaver in New York while studying for his PHD, to the cleaners and agricultural workers who meet for prayers on a Friday and share the joy of festivals such as Tobaski…. puts the wastage of the consumer driven western world in a very clear perspective!
Put another way….for the price of a gallon of unleaded fuel at the UK pumps this weekend…you could feed 15 people in Africa for a month.
For 2.5 pence…1/40th of a UK pound……1.5 US cents….1/60th of a US dollar…..you could get 100 miles of energy for your electric car!
How many more…..countries will suffer the rape and pillage and the fall-out of such dreadful natural disasters that are currently ongoing around the world? How much more ….of a burden will the people be asked to carry? Is it that we have, in the Reichian sense, become so impotent that we need the supremacy and the butchery of a war zone in our living rooms to get our sexual juices flowing! Are we so passive that the very taking of breath in our lives is simply to avoid the stench of the rotting karma that awaits us for the despicable way that we behave? We have got a whole lot of work to do…..!!
Africa…once it is blessed with peaceful settlement…has a cultural renaissance to build and can look forward to an exciting and a richly rewarding journey.
The white Anglo Saxon protestant/catholic American/European middle class has a karmic date with its own mortality! We are the children of those who trail blazed their particular kind of extortion, guilt and genocide around the world. It is time to shake the tree to its foundations!
It isn’t about the Left! It isn’t about the Right. It is about the Wrong. The wrongdoing that has become so deeply embedded in our DNA that we are incapable of telling the difference!
Paul Hill
I doubt it, because the reason they could fire Keith is because the people he recruited, initially as stand-ins — Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow — are doing so well. O’Donnell is going to the prime 8 pm slot, and Ed Schultz is going to the 10 pm slot, replacing O’Donnell.
These people are all good; from the viewpoint of network execs, Keith was..well..special.
I wonder if Rachael Maddow’s days on the network are numbered.
I think ‘power’ may be becoming more unashamedly ‘out’ because it is being ‘outed’..
Thank you, Monsieur Assange!
It actually helps when power stops even trying to disguise itself (provided we don’t capitulate – a very REAL risk)
This is a time of manifestation and to quote Faithless ‘You don’t need eyes to see, you need vision’
How will people respond to overtly-manifested power? Will we accept things I wonder?
Speaking of toxins and pollutants being administered overtly at the same time as censorship is being forced through with no concern about potential public outcry; check this out:
http://www.naturalnews.com/031076_USDA_bird_deaths.html
Power seems to be ‘coming out’ everywhere and trying to normalise itself. We are all under such assault economically, in a way that has been portrayed as an inevitable and necessary fait accompli, that everyone just has to accept that the normal rules no longer apply and this is ‘just HOW THINGS ARE’.. Ergo power just does its thing and we’d better get used to it, because that’s how the world now is!
Hi Jude!
I’ll miss Keith, although without a TV or cable, I’ve had to watch over the inter-tubes here. I suspect that while he won’t be back as a broadcaster, he’ll be able to still express his opinions and commentary via other means.
He’s in pretty good with Arianna Huffpo and many other progressive media sources, so methinks he’ll be in print rather quickly.
He is a voice that speaks for many of us.
We don’t get MSNBC here in the Pea Patch — prolly too danged Commie fer us patriots — but I hang out with a friend on Friday nights to watch Bill Maher and that’s where I heard about this. The Right will spin it with a vengeance, I suspect.
As regards Citizens United, Public Citizen is pushing hard for an amendment, supported by 3/4 million Americans
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/21-12
… and Common Cause wants the decision scrapped because of the political activity of Justices Scalia and Thomas — I would REALLY like to see that happen, finger pointed back at these thugs!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-bob-edgar/a-supreme-conflict-of-int_b_811430.html
And perhaps the Pholus factor bleeds over into the NBC/Comcast consolidation. KO is a loss, hopefully temporary. The consolidation is an entire war over public perception. Juan Cole and I apparently agree on that; surprising that he’d be the guy to articulate it so well.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/22-2