Keeping Score
We Americans have two big shows going on. One of them is the Superbowl, in San Francisco at the moment, a 500-pound gorilla who’s sitting wherever he wants. The other one sucking the brains out of the US public is the presidential campaign.
It’s hard to take either of them seriously (see Pretend Politix).
It happens every election year: You always think, It can’t get more absurd than this. And then it always does.
Citizens vs. Consumers
It is a testament to the US public’s love of grotesque spectacle that, despite the egregious corruptions that have been revealed over the past eight years,(1) political rallies keep being held and crowds keep showing up, in red, white and blue outfits.
I am all for Americans engaging in some sort of public forum, earnestly rooting for something. It is refreshing, once every four years, to see the populace playing at
being citizens rather than consumers. But in order to pretend something real is going on, I think a mass suspension of disbelief has to take place.
Otherwise it’s hard to fathom how — in a post-Citizens-United world, where multinational corporations can openly buy elections — enthusiastic fans of this or that candidate can find meaning in these rituals. I am not sure what role they see themselves playing.(2)
Postmillennial Patriotism
American patriotism in the twenty-teens seems to derive from a fervent wish that we could be as naïve as we once were, back in the postwar years (that is, post-WWII. [In the old days, we could use the prefix post- with the word war].) But 
nostalgia for a more innocent time(3) is a poor substitute for Being Here Now, as surely as Thomas Kincaid paintings are a poor substitute for art.
Many of us have always found knee-jerk patriotism distasteful; and if there were ever any genuineness to it, the shameless hypocrisies on display from the current candidates only serve to confirm our worst expectations.
But at issue here is not the philosophical value of patriotism, but the fact that it’s obsolete.
Saturn square Neptune
In this year of Saturn in Sagittarius (traditional values) square Neptune (timeless universality), old-school nationalism is coming up threadbare. For the USA, it is embarrassingly obvious that flag-waving belongs to an age that is past. Saturn in Sagittarius (idealism) is on the Ascendant of the US chart (national persona) through 2016, square to Neptune (undermining).
The American self-image has always been notoriously small-minded; our ignorance about the rest of the world is as lamentable now as it was in Dickens’ and Trollope’s time. But there’s an urgency to these years we live in that demands a breakthrough in collective consciousness — a growth spurt into a bigger frame of reference. Saturn on the USA’s Ascendant is a teaching about the responsibilities of citizenship, and its rare coupling with Neptune insists upon a new spiritual maturity.
The caricaturishly puerile Mr Trump, of course, embodies exactly the opposite. The Donald(4) is a walking, sputtering personification of reaction: our collective reaction to Saturn’s demand that we grow up. We should attend carefully to the man, for we have created him. In the face of the hard realities of global adulthood, he is what arrested development looks like.
The question is, What would the opposite of Trump look like? How might a country with these transits respond, rather than react to them? What would a new, 21st-century maturity look like for the USA?
Thirty-year cycle
Readers who have been through Saturn-on-the-Ascendant in their own charts know that this transit is a crash course in the law of karma. Add to this Neptune’s melting down of barriers, and the Big Picture (Sagittarius) gets way bigger, rendering irrelevant the puffed-up allegiance to nation-statehood that characterized our last couple of centuries.
Saturn doesn’t give a pea whether a politician is wearing a flag pin. To honor the god of truth and consequences, Americans might instead undertake a mercilessly honest self-examination of their country’s current standing in the world. This would mean cutting through the media blather and considering what kind of actions Washington has become associated with, over the past cycle (30 years of Saturn through the houses).(5) For by our acts shall we be known. And what would these be?
Check the headlines of foreign newspapers. We find stories on the shoot-to-kill tactics of US police, the stand-your-ground nonsense in Oregon, and the monthly murders-by-drone of innocents far away. This is where our karma 
is building up, and the whole world is watching.
By contrast, the priorities expressed in the campaign “debates” reveal a public bewitched by the banal and clueless about the consequential. The corporate media, whose m.o. is to magnify random point-scoring details, deliberately ignores the very issues that would help us cultivate a sense of responsible citizenhood.
Meanwhile, the USA is approaching its Pluto Return (reassessment of power), a turning point that hinges(6) on doing the work of Saturn (cause-and-effect): ‘fessing up to our role in today’s daunting global crises.
With the big banks about to speculate us into another worldwide crash, the dollar slipping from primacy and the Asian behemoths nudging Uncle Sam increasingly to the geopolitical sidelines, we can be sure Bernie is right that the issue is not Hillary’s emails.
Group karma
In the Tower of Babel that is election-year programming, there’s a lot of talk about ISIS. But none of it is about where they came from and what motivates their vengeful rage. Saturn, the great scorekeeper, is still waiting for the US public to get hip to the connection between Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State.
And although the subject of taxes comes up a lot, there is no discussion about the billions of dollars in lethal weaponry that these taxes buy, nor about how Washington’s military spending shores up some of the most despicable regimes on Earth.
The price of gas is always good for a mention in political speeches. But not in connection with its source: the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, whose owners, the appalling Saudi monarchy, are the recipients of slavish support from Washington. This is the regime that considers women legal chattel, stones adulterers to death, and sentenced blogger Raif Badawi to a thousand lashes and ten years in prison for advocating free speech. This is the sheikdom based upon Wahhabism: the sect that spawned Al Qaeda and ISIS.
Another set of dots left unconnected in the public conversation. But not by the god of karma.
Notes
1 Since Pluto (corruption, breakdown) went into Capricorn (monetary and governmental institutions) and the Cardinal Cross period began.
2 An academic study from 2014 that was set up to determine political influences in the USA found, unsurprisingly, that lawmakers respond overwhelmingly to those interests with the most active lobbying and the deepest pockets; whereas “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero… impact on public policy.” And this analysis was formulated before SuperPacs, dark money and the Wall Street bailout.
3 Of course, the country wasn’t innocent even then; its sins were just unpublicized. On “Father Knows Best,” the iconic TV show portraying the ideal American family, the 
little actress who played Kitten was being sexually abused at home during the run of the series. The actor playing Dad attempted suicide. The actor playing the wholesome teenage son said years later, “The show did everyone a disservice…What we did was run a hoax;…the model is so deceitful. …If I could say anything to make up for all the years I lent myself to (that), it would be, ‘You Know Best.‘”
4 “The Donald” is a hysterical nickname for the man. It’s a sly dig from ex-wife Ivana, who most will never remember by name, but whose contribution to the Trump annals was to invent an enduring moniker that reduces him to a figure of fun — with enough ambiguity so that his team hasn’t batted it away.
5 See “Years of Reckoning,” The Mountain Astrologer, Dec/Jan’16 issue.
6 Discussed in my NCGR podcast from February, 2016.