There is a theatrical device called ‘breaking the fourth wall’. That is when an actor steps off the stage and addresses, even confronts their audience directly, breaking the wall separating the audience from the theatrical illusion on stage before them. Both actor and audience are freed of their roles as perpetrator and observer of the scene on the proscenium, sets and all.
On Friday, January 29, with the Full Moon opposite our Aquarian Sun and conjunct retrograde Mars, President Obama broke a fourth wall of politics, stepping away from the White House podium and into a python pit. At the Republican Party’s invitation, he spoke at its congressional retreat in Baltimore, Maryland, where the ratio of Republicans to Democrats in the room was 140 to one.
In the course of 90 minutes the president spoke and then took questions from the opposition party, during which time he demolished Republican talking points used to discredit the Democrats’ health care reform bill and the administration’s stimulus plan. Furthermore, he placed the blame for the economy squarely on the Bush administration and the Republican congressional majority’s legislation passed during the mid nineties: welfare reform, decreased tax burden for the wealthiest, laws ending careful scrutiny and regulation of the banking industry, intractable wars costing billions daily and dragging on without end.