The Comfort Zone
"We were all wrong." So reads the cover of the Feb. 5 edition of Newsweek, quoting David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq. With this, Newsweek gave new meaning to the words "cover story."
The front page depicts Bush, with his permanently imprinted, whiny, I didn't do it expression. There is Blair, looking like he learned everything he knows in Catholic school. Rumsfeld, whose face always reminds me a lot, not a little, of any Nazi you like. Powell, earnest, indignant and spouting utter nonsense. Rice, always looking like she's in the midst of a petit mal seizure; it's her eyes. Cheney, one side of his lip raised, snarling all the way to the investment bank. Tenent, who would look no different if Matt Groening drew him into The Simpsons.
We're supposed to believe these people? They made a little mistake and bombed Iraq and killed and maimed thousands of people who were minding their own lives, ditched the U.S. military in the desert for what may work out to be decades, blew the federal budget, drove the leader of a sovereign state from office, and have so far wasted the lives of nearly 550 of our soldiers, all by accident?
It's either that, or you need a good conspiracy theory. We all know the moment we say, "These people knew exactly what they were doing, they lied to us," there's always one idiot in the room who pipes up and says he doesn't believe in conspiracy theories. The implication is that if you do believe that people in the White House, the Pentagon and the corporate community (to the extent that they are even different people) work together for certain common purposes, you have a soft mind, you draw conclusions where you don't have facts, and you're basically a fool.
We have just about all fallen for the same lines on the Sept. 11 scandals -- the ones about how there were FBI memos warning about the attacks, where Bush was briefed on the whole thing on Aug. 6 and everyone kind of looked in the other direction, then once the cataclysm occurred and everyone was in a state of shock, they seized control of the world amidst great panic and fear. Then came a series of domestic crackdowns on freedom and privacy along with two long, ongoing, bloody and expensive wars. When anyone is in doubt as to why, run the film clip of the World Trade Centre falling down. Go figure.
I have become fascinated lately with why people believe lies. Given how much time I've spent untangling the lies of government and corporations in my reporting career, this is probably a hobby I should have taken up years ago, because even as lies and liars are exposed again and again, people still believe them. Watch, and you'll see people believing liars with a devotion that verges on religious fervour, and many would suggest that such is another form of addiction to deception.
Most recently, I've taken an interest in the history of the Watergate scandal. We all know Watergate has happened because every other scandal gets named after it -- Contragate, Travelgate, Botoxgate. But Watergate, the real thing, is a very interesting and frightening story. It started with the lucky bust of a late-night break-in at the Watergate hotel and office complex in the spring of 1972. Five burglars were arrested, in suits, with lots of cash in their pockets, planting bugs at the Democratic National Headquarters. There was a cover-up; what was being covered up turned out not to be the bugging itself, but rather the existence of a vast espionage and harassment network involving the FBI and the CIA that was designed to destroy any and all of Nixon's enemies.
Nixon, of course, said he was clueless.
Two young reporters at the Washington Post, following hunches, clues and contradictions in the official story, made Watergate what it eventually became, which is the only scandal to result in the resignation of a United States president. To me, the awesome thing about this particular scandal is that, over the subsequent six months, even as it reached higher and higher into the Nixon administration, people still believed that the president could never have been involved, and he was re-elected in November of 1972 by a landslide victory: he won 49 states. He then survived another 18 months in office, only resigning when impeachment was imminent.
Despite hundreds of denials and accusations of partisan political motives against the Washington Post, it turned out that every member of the administration was involved.
Why do people believe lies?
In the case of Watergate, the most important people to believe lies and fall for the official denials were network executives and newspaper editors who were either scared of retaliation, or too closely involved with the political process and the people in it to see the proverbial forest for the trees. In other words, there were a lot of good Republicans at the helm of important media and it took them quite a while to catch on, or alternately, to come out of denial trips.
Some feared that the story would be too messy for the public to deal with. There were other issues: no easy visuals for TV. Too many angles to cover. Sources who would not give their names. A story that reached so far and in so many directions that it could never be summed up in two minutes, which is how long the average news story gets. This is an atmosphere of denial within which deception festers magnificently, and we live in it today.
Individuals not in control of networks are not much different in how we process reality. We often base our perceptions on pre-existing beliefs, such as the prejudice of something being too complicated to be true. Then there's everyone who believes that, "We must stand strong" or "The economy is at stake" or "The president would never do that" or "The administration would never lie." In essence, we're talking about an ideological comfort zone. Often, the first layer of the disguise is fear cloaked in idealism, and this quickly gets complicated.
There's a big difference between the psychology of accepting a lie and the psychology of understanding a complicated set of facts that expose that lie. Deception says that human nature is neat, orderly and as you like it. The truth often says that people in power can operate from dark, greedy and violent motives and work together toward goals that are often unthinkable, and which violate your interests and those of your neighbours. To accept a lie, we don't need to do anything. To understand a lie and seek the truth, we need to rearrange our minds. We also need to get involved with the whole disgusting process of the deception in order to understand it. It's extremely uncomfortable, it requires speculation, and it takes time and effort.
Then, in the end, we have to admit that our instincts failed us. Many people are so attached to being right, they get duped. Con artists know all of this.
Where an issue like national security is concerned, we are often frightened enough to be extremely gullible. If you threaten people with fear of social unrest, economic instability, terrorism or communism, they're usually going to go along. Going along is simple and easy. And ultimately, you don't have to take responsibility for your choice; you're just being a good citizen. You merely have to accept what someone who supposedly has responsibility says is true, and get on with your life.
Which leads me to Bliss, Capen, Gage and Scudder residence halls at SUNY New Paltz. For a recent article, see this link:
http://www.chronogram.com/chronogram/backbone/planetwaves.html
These buildings were contaminated with PCBs and dioxins in a chain-reaction series of transformer explosions in December 1991.
I spent a day at SUNY New Paltz last week, speaking with students and touring two of the contaminated buildings. It was extremely creepy walking through the corridors of places I have file drawers full of evidence are contaminated, and seeing students living in them all warm and cosy as if nothing was wrong. I was, of course, filled with the urge to start knocking on doors and warning people, but somehow I kept to my journalistic mission of sizing up the situation and collecting facts.
It helped that, hours earlier, my day on campus had begun with a conversation with a vegan activist who was giving out literature in the Student Union Building. Veganism is good for your health in that by not eating animal products, you're eating lower on the food chain, and hence you take in far less PCBs and dioxins through your diet.
I asked her what she knew about the situation, and she said that she lived in Bliss Hall. On the first day of school this year, her roommate's mother was in their dorm room extremely upset because, one way or another, she had heard about the situation. (Contamination in Bliss reached the one million times the state's allegedly safe toxins level. Dioxin was found on the third floor. Student property in the building at the time of the transformer explosion was put into a toxic waste dump near Niagara Falls.)
Despite the vocal protests of one roommate's mother, both girls still live in Bliss Hall. They cannot plead ignorance, and our vegan activist cannot claim she's someone who lacks social concerns or trusts McDonald's. It's not like she doesn't know the stuff can hurt her. She and her roommate just live in a comfort zone. ++
Planet Waves Horoscope
For the week of 13 Feb. 2004
Aries
(March 20-April 19)
There are a lot of rather interesting people around you and, if you're interested, one or more will make truly good friends and one or more will make excellent lovers. The friend/lover divide is made unnaturally wide by social factors that just don't need to be there, and which serve no one except the advertising industry. To be free of socially imposed nonsense, you have to do three things, if you ask me. First, think for yourself. Second, tell the truth about how you feel and what you want. Third, trust people to deal with who you really are. Do this long enough and you'll start to get the message yourself.Taurus
(April 19-May 20)
It seems you're struggling with the issue of respect. You've got an ideal in mind of what it means to be respected, but at the same time, this notion has a way of getting you into trouble with yourself. I suggest you look for the most persistent respect issues you've faced going back as long as you care to look. Is there ever a time when you're accused of demanding too much, and when that happens, how do you respond? What's different about now is that you have the self-respect to support you from the inside while you seek a reflection of who and what you need in the world around you.Gemini
(May 20-June 21)
Lately you've evolved from being an idea person to a futurist. In your case, futurist means seeing far-off pictures of time, as well as far away places. Many people struggle with an inability to see not just beyond their present moment, but also beyond the present physical circumstances. Things are done differently in different places, and you can bring news of the world to your immediate environment in a way that people actually get the message. As humans, we are so often entrapped by our flaws, and we need every advantage toward going beyond them. What you can offer the situation will help everyone do just that.Cancer
(June 21-July 22)
You're in an awesome moment for working out the details of a long-term partnership or marriage contract. Remember, relationships are based on agreements, the more conscious the better. Agreements, in turn, are based on common ground. While most people function in a world of differences, there are options. If you'll focus on the goals, needs, desires and objectives that you and a close partner or partners have in common, you'll establish a solid basis in community. Community is never based on conflict, but it takes authentic dedication and conscious insight to get there. These are, in actual fact, available right now.Leo
(July 22-Aug. 23)
Over the past week, it would seem that you've been trying to work out some emotional material so you can create a change of direction in the biggest sense of the word. I'm convinced that having a better life means having a different life than our parents. Otherwise (and many people will disagree, until the obvious becomes obvious) we unconsciously live their lives until we consciously live our own. The problem is we don't always know. Over the next three or so days, focus not just on your parents, but on your grandparents. Something has been handed down to you from them and, as you were taught to do, you may tend to hold it in or cover it up. What comes out this week stays out.Virgo
(Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
Events of the past few days seem to have left you off of centre stage, and it may be quite difficult for you to see the vital role you play. This is particularly true in a work-related situation where ideas count for everything. What you most likely cannot see is the extraordinary influence you're bringing to bear on the situation. Just the fact that you have clear ideas is guiding things in precisely the correct direction, which is true no matter what you may feel about whether people actually respect you. The point is, they likely have no clue they're being influenced by you. Don't mention it or you'll break the spell.Libra
(Sep. 22-Oct. 23)
If the world is a mirror, what do you do when you see something you don't like? And how far do we go with this? Is every bad thing that happens a reflection of what's inside you? I would say yes, as long as every magnificent work of art, exquisitely beautiful person, gorgeous child and pristine mountain range are also reflections of your inner being. So-called spiritual theories that teach us to look for our reflection in annoying people and events rarely point out that the rest of creation reflects who we are as well. This whole equation leaves us just where we started: in the world, with the many choices that presents.Scorpio
(Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
You're accustomed to being the most intense person in the room, in your company or in your family. Part of this is the mythos of Scorpio: from birth, people responded with awe and wonder to the mere mention of your birth sign. Then, it's rather likely you were onto a wide variety of secrets long before anyone else, and if you mentioned them, it was trouble time. These days you're a kind of initiator. Your role is to vibe powerfully with your inner truth and at the same time see and feel that same reality in everyone around you. Bring it out in them, gently, perhaps subtly, and mostly by example. Everyone will feel a lot better.Sagittarius
(Nov. 22-Dec. 22)
I cannot escape the sense that this is a challenging time for you, particularly where reaching toward your most cherished goals is concerned. That's saying a lot, for a Sagittarian, whose goals often far exceed what has previously been deemed humanly possible. I'm with you; we all need to go beyond what we thought was possible and we need your help leading the way. I strongly suggest you focus on ideas. Not visions, but concrete ideas, complete with drawings, notes, instructions and references. Most important, take notes on the people you want to involve in your projects, and begin tentative discussions to feel them out.Capricorn
(Dec. 22-Jan. 20)
Step aside from the feeling that you're being hunted or pursued and you'll be more likely to feel the protection that's around you, and around any small children you've got in your care. Meanwhile, I can only share my opinion that you can never really stalk someone for their commitment to you. You just have to let them come through, and take the lessons one step at a time. You certainly do expect a lot from yourself, and you may be feeling like you've made promises to yourself that you cannot keep. Time will prove that you're going to keep every one, even if it takes you a while to figure this out.Aquarius
(Jan. 20-Feb. 19)
One of the best things you have going for you is that you're an ethical person. You care about the difference between right and wrong in your everyday transactions, and you want to do the right thing. What you're being offered during this phase of your life is a deeper gift, which is the ability to see and feel the interconnections between people that are the soul of your ethics. There is a cause for every effect, and while in a certain situation now coming to light, the cause has not changed, you are now becoming more aware of its presence and its purpose.Pisces
(Feb. 19-March 20)
Revolution is brewing in your life, and it involves both awareness and action. Awareness arrives as being a few steps ahead of certain people around you on assembling the pieces to a puzzle the size of a football field. Action will arrive in the form of decisions, or one particular decision, that you make over the next few days, and it may guide your life for months or years. I say guide, not rule. If there's one thing you're not going to tolerate, it's conditions that fail to accommodate your true being. Fortunately, the world is as ready to accept you as you've been willing to adapt to it.
Late Aquarius Birthdays
Those with birthdays in the last week of Aquarius will experience a year of what can genuinely be called resolution. No doubt you have felt a certain provocation in this respect, as if long forgotten personal material is perking to the surface of your awareness quite beyond your control. This may seem disconcerting, but the result will be to break an inner consensus which essentially puts you in the role of victim of your past.
It's safe to say that you may not have a clue how far back the past goes. In the modern world, the past goes back about 15 minutes, before which everything is ancient history. While this has a kind of drug-like effect making only the distraction of the moment seem to matter, what is lost is precisely the ability to BE in the moment because the past dominates one's life secretly. Now, the factors which have been responsible for this are extraordinarily likely to come to the surface.
I offer the prospect that the past as you need to think of it goes back at least to your grandparents' generation. I suggest you consider the events of their life as having the impact of the direct events of your own. This may seem unusual; after all, what happened to them happened so long ago -- except that it did not. It happened to you vicariously, and many would testify, is held directly in your body's memory. The real repulsion to accepting their past as our own is that theirs seems so much more difficult. I don't think it was; mainly it was different, but we tend to under-estimate the difficulty of our own lives. The problem arrives when we take their fears and run them unconsciously within our present context.
All of this can now come to light. We can experience the past, basically, in two ways: as hardcore emotional drama, or more in cartoon fashion. In the first, we can become totally subsumed by events that have little to no actual effect, but which can drain substantial energy from our lives, and serve to take us away. When events fall into the second category, it's more like watching pictures go by. There can be emotions associated with these pictures, intense responses or provocation to action, but there is at the same time a sense of detachment. It may not seem like you have a choice in the matter as to which you experience, but at this point, I think that you do.
The essential element, as always, is one of awareness. What you're being presented with now is the option to shift your awareness to a much more subtle level. Some call this intuition, and in the past, you may have required some kind of scientific, intellectual or data backup to confirm your intuition. It would now seem that you're getting ready to trust that what you know, you know. Even trusting that you don't know what you don't know is a form of intuition, and that will serve to leave your mind open rather than it attempting to fill in a mystery, of half the facts or less, with an incorrect interpretation.
As you deal with the situations that arise from your own personal past, you will likely see that the potential for both new and different experiences of relationship is wide open. It would help to be honest about how aware you've become about the inner qualities you possess, your inner contradictions and the fact that you process your emotions in what can seem to others like strange ways. But the truth is you can get the job done if you remember not to have too many ideas about your feelings, just feel them and let them go. To have ideas about feelings is like assigning meaning to each ripple in a stream as it goes by. While you're thinking about one, you miss numerous others.
What you are looking for, really, is the larger pattern. In much the same way, the past tells many stories, and it also reveals several consistent patterns. Look not so much carefully, but gently, and you will see that these patterns, rather than trapping you, present you with choices, and it's in making these choices that you have the opportunity to live with intention and not in the automatic way that so often characterises your life.
Note on the birthday report, plus the week's astrology
This is an interpretation of the last quarter Moon, Friday morning. The dominant aspect in the chart is Moon in Scorpio conjunct Pholus, with both square the Sun. Pholus, in late Aquarius, is making aspects to the natal Sun of people who are born the last week of all the fixed signs -- Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. Plus, there are a lot of other people with late-degree fixed Moons and other planets as well.
So -- birthday reports can hold valid psychological imagery for many people besides those with birthdays any given week. They're also a working general reading of the main chart used to write the horoscope of any given week.
Here's a little more of what I see in the chart.
The most interesting aspect in the major planets is Mercury about to make a conjunction to Neptune in Aquarius. Neptune moves slowly -- about 12 years per sign; Mercury moves quickly, usually spending a few weeks in each sign. Mercury's presence is likely to evoke events, ideas or feelings that remind us just what Neptune in Aquarius is about.
Outer planets are invisible enough by themselves; Neptune is the most invisible of all. Mercury is showing up just in time to remind us to see the invisible and have a little faith in the impossible. Notice that Mercury and Neptune square the lunar nodes, which are in Taurus and Scorpio. Whatever we notice has the power to represent a decision that can truly have a determining effect on the course of our lives. The nodes have enormous momentum.
After this happens, Mars comes along and crosses the North Node and at the same time squares Neptune. This is not considered one of the prettiest aspects in the book; it's generally associated with situations where the truth has a hard time coming out, or where it comes out in a very ugly form. I think the main point of this aspect is not to get in to the mud with people. There is always an addictive quality to Neptune and with a square to Mars, the addiction can be to negativity.
Whatever the case, Mars on the North Node is about the right direction, based on living out the right values for who we really are.
Remember that Pholus is involved, and Pholus is provocative. And, as I always mention when talking about this planet, its themes, situations and issues go back three or more generations. Pholus also deals with collective issues. Any time you find yourself in any perplexing situation, remind yourself that other people are dealing with this same situation, and that it is, in a sense, cultural property. Remember this especially any time alcohol is involved.
