There's a great buzz on the 'net today (October 9th) about US President Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. At first, I thought it was a spoof a la "The Onion," and I'm not the only one. You could cut the "cognitive dissonance" with a knife, as people sense something off here. And if you're on the receiving end of a drone-delivered bomb, or stuck indefinitely in a secret prison, it might seem like the world is upside down. Lies are truth, War is peace, in an Orwellian nightmare.
As I took in this bit of bizarre news this morning, I stumbled on some background of the Prize and its beneficiary Alfred Nobel His chart shows he's a late degree Libra (October 21, 1833), whose Sun opposed both his Jupiter in Taurus (wealth creation) and Pluto in Aries (warrior power). Nobel was an armaments manufacturer and inventor of dynamite. It may explain why a Libra made his fortune in the war business.
He ran an iron business that he converted to making cannons. Later his company, Bofors, was famous for creating the 40 mm anti-aircraft gun used on both sides of World War II. He made his money from death-dealing weapons, causing untold human suffering.
It makes you wonder if he created this Prize from a guilty conscience. It epitomizes the split we see in leaders today. They mouth words of peace, but carry on with acts of war. The prize comes on the day of the lunar bombing, just to add to the surreality of it all.
I called on my friend and mentor Jessica Murray, who wrote Soul Sick Nation, a must-read on the contradictions of our time. She uses astrology to illuminate the paradoxes of the American psyche, like how we're susceptible to believing in symbols over substance. In this exclusive, Jessica gives her take on this award, given at a time when the world had hope that he would restore balance. It was a time when he looked to be a leader for the future (Uranus), not the leader of the establishment (Saturn).
From Jessica Murray"Yes, because of its origins with Nobel the Dynamite man, I too have always considered this Prize a dark cosmic joke; one more symptom of the psychosis of the modern epoch. How perversely appropriate that it was awarded on the day the US bombed the Moon. Yet there are multiple levels of meaning there. Consider the difference between Obama the politician and Obama the symbol. The prize has been awarded to the symbol.
Given the historical moment of his rise, BO came to personify something that has little to do with him as an individual. The cosmic meaning of his election was that the dark Bush years were over, and that millions of ordinary people allowed themselves to care, once again, about the state of the world. It was the potential of last year's election that constituted a threat to the ecocidal trajectory the world is on.
The powers-that-be knew that this well-cultivated party man was not really a challenge to their system, but they understood that the enthusiasm he unleashed could have turned into a series of genuine popular uprisings (for a year now many of us have been urging his fans to shift their attention from the glamorous new president to his actual policies: to push him from below; to get him to make good on his archetypal promise).
Many Nobel watchers were surprised at how early in his presidency the Prize was granted (Obama took office less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline). But this is the point. The idea to award him was conceived when the transit that bore him to victory was still shimmering in the air: the opposition of Uranus (the future) and Saturn (the past]). I think that once the monopolization of the media by the health care reform faux-debate has run its course, the reality of Obama's non-peacefulness is going to dawn on large numbers of his fans. For more, read my article, Guns and Butter.
