{"id":45098,"date":"2011-09-06T00:01:33","date_gmt":"2011-09-06T04:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=45098"},"modified":"2011-09-06T14:02:47","modified_gmt":"2011-09-06T18:02:47","slug":"grief-for-sale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/astro-daily\/grief-for-sale\/","title":{"rendered":"Grief for Sale"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nubble Pond, Raymond, Maine. Photo by Amanda Painter.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today is Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2011<\/strong><\/a>.Today the mid-Virgo Sun is square the centaur planets Hylonome and Pholus, and an intergalactic point called the Great Attractor. This translates to emotional volatility and the possibility of fast changes, potentially helpful, potentially difficult — but the key is to be able to navigate your own emotions through these fast changes. There is a time for ‘sitting with’ things and a time to move with some agility — and we are currently in one of the latter phases now.<\/p>\n

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Tuesday morning at 7 EDT sharp, the Capricorn Moon is conjunct Pluto, shortly after squaring Uranus. This is an aspect calling for precisely that kind of agility. It may have a solitary or lonely feeling, though the experience at the core may be something more akin to soulful.<\/p>\n

Back to the solar aspects that are at center stage. Since late last week, we’ve been developing the story of the minor planet cluster in mid-Sagittarius, involving many planets that you may have never heard of until now. In case you want to go deeper, here are references to each: Pholus<\/a>, Hylonome<\/a> and the Great Attractor<\/a>. These pages are not comprehensive, but they will get you started on sorting these points one by one.<\/p>\n

The Sun emphasizes expression of whatever it contacts. Hylonome has the theme of wide-scale anguish and individual grief. It can range from the sadness inherent in mass poverty to individual loss — and how we approach these things in a coherent way. Pholus is like an activating agent or a catalyst. It’s an accelerant that can push any experience forward, and can be associated with processes that run out of control. Both Hylonome and Pholus have associations with healing, merely by dint of being from the centaur group of planets. What they represent can become a focal point, and then that awareness can be conveyed into a productive purpose.<\/p>\n

The Great Attractor, for its part, is not a planet. It is a massive object way beyond our galaxy that is spewing radiation on every frequency except visible light. It attracts, magnifies and polarizes, in various combinations. It can be associated with things that are so large we don’t see them, and some things that are so large we will never see them. (Contrast this with the nearby Galactic Center, which can have the feeling of being ‘behind everything’ but sooner or later you might notice, based on enough observation.) With the Great Attractor, you might never know what you’re dealing with, and this is the case today for many people who have no idea that they are being sold pain, grief and suffering as a manufactured product. I mean this literally, as a fact of advertising and ‘news’.<\/p>\n

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This is the week we’re hearing a lot of discussions about the Sept. 11 incident. Now at the 10th anniversary, its various saints are being canonized and its physical objects are becoming relics<\/a>; the anger and sadness that we’re supposed to feel at what those evil-doers did to us is precious, and we’re being asked to take it out of its special glass box and look at it, and show it to others. There is exceedingly little advocacy of a quest for understanding; the quest for truth seems even less relevant. Sept. 11 is all about what we believe, and what we’ve justified by our anger and sense of loss. <\/p>\n

Here are a few examples from Monday’s headlines.<\/p>\n

Earlier Monday, a CNN story on Texas wildfires got the sidebar title \u201cMom, baby killed; 300 homes burned<\/a>\u201d despite that not being the headline when you click on the page. This is obviously playing on the seductive ‘gotta look at misery’ effect of dead baby and mother. Actual title when you click on the article is: “Perry: Sweeping Texas wildfires have ‘devastating effects’.” The thing to remember about these pages is that they’re sponsored by advertisers; if they don’t get clicks, nobody will pay to have their banner there.<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/em> carried a story about the ways different networks\/media outlets are handling the amount and type of 9\/11 coverage, including the decision not to run ads versus running ads as usual:<\/p>\n

But in documenting the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, there is a fine line between commemoration and exploitation. <\/p>\n

Mindful of this, television networks, magazines and others planning special coverage of the anniversary have weighed issues like how much American audiences can stomach, and how much such a solemn occasion should be viewed as a business opportunity. <\/p>\n

There are no uniform answers, and media outlets are approaching it differently. Time magazine is running no ads at all. Newsweek and People have sold ads just as they would for any other issue. Cable channels, which are devoting big blocks of their schedules to Sept. 11-related programming, are also largely running commercials as usual. But there exceptions; CNN, for example, is to show a joint HBO-Time special commercial free. In its regular Sunday edition on Sept. 11, The New York Times<\/em> is publishing a special section that will contain only commemorative ads. <\/p>\n

“There\u2019s no precedent for something like this,” said Lawrence C. Burstein, the publisher of New York magazine, who added that he initially did not expect to sell many ads in the 10th anniversary issue. But to his surprise, he found that advertiser demand was strong, with the magazine experiencing a 46 percent increase in the number of ad pages in the Sept. 5-12 double issue, compared with the Sept. 13 issue last year. <\/p>\n

He and the New York sales and editorial team decided to forgo the typical promotional campaign employed for special issues and gave advertisers who had already bought space in the magazine the option of bowing out. <\/p>\n

“It is something that touches people in all kinds of different personal ways,” Mr. Burstein said, “and I felt like it was a decision that the advertiser had to make.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At least the discussion is happening, with the hint of ethical concern. That is encouraging. Let’s hope some people notice there really is an issue of exploiting grief for profit; that it didn’t go out with the demise of News of the World<\/em>. It would not work without some deep psychological stuff going on for many people. What we think of as ‘public’ really amounts to adding up many, many private lives, which have enough in common to form a kind of environment that responds with its own properties.<\/p>\n

Sun-Hylonome-Pholus, mixed up with the Great Attractor, can speak to a sense of deep inadequacy on the individual level — the kind that can alienate people. But there’s this element of not caring what other people think when we’re in pain, and how we relate to the whole issue of forgiveness — and whether we’re forgiven. This, we will look at more closely in tomorrow’s column.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2011.Today the mid-Virgo Sun is square the centaur planets Hylonome and Pholus, and an intergalactic point called the Great Attractor. This translates to emotional volatility and the possibility of fast changes, potentially helpful, potentially difficult — but the key is to be able to navigate your own emotions through these … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1734],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45098"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}