The Fruit of the Poison Tree

Many people are wondering what happened.

After plunging the nation into its deepest debt ever, after 1,100 U.S. soldiers and an estimated 100,000 Iraqis are killed on the basis of a lie, after cutting military benefits and simultaneously ripping off seniors with the drug benefits program, after the lack of weapons of mass destruction, after the horrid abuses at Abu Ghraib were spread all over TV and the Internet, after the revelation of even more government-approved atrocities in every other U.S. military prison, after having ignored advance warning of Sept. 11 and then letting Osama bin Laden run loose and blaming Saddam Hussein for something he had nothing to do with, after innumerable hostage situations and after bungling three debates -- after all of this, the Republican Party sweeps into the presidency and increases its majorities in the House and Senate.

What happened?

Assuming Bush actually got the most votes -- I have my doubts -- I have an idea.

Let's go back to the beginning of the year: late January, when the political campaigns were just heating up with the primary elections. The state of Massachusetts had just adopted its new law creating marriages for gay and lesbian couples, the first in the United States. This came after the legislature was instructed to do so the previous autumn by the state's Supreme Court. I arrived in Massachusetts that day and it was exciting just to be there at that moment.

A few days later, I headed for New Paltz, New York -- my home of many years -- where the young village mayor named Jason West, elected by students and the Green Party, went ahead and began marrying gay and lesbian couples. It was a truly bold act of progress and defiance. He was then arrested (in a 'negotiated surrender' which basically involved walking downstairs in the same building) after the Ulster County District Attorney's office filed criminal charges against him.

The support from the community was truly energized, loving and momentous. Thousands of people poured into the streets, even coming from hundreds of miles away, to support him and stand up for gay marriages. There was a feeling of public celebration. The parking lot at Village Hall had more satellite news trucks stuffed in than I've ever seen in one place. Everyone knew we were witnessing history. Right around the same week, the mayor of San Francisco began marrying gay couples. We had reached the actual beginning of an era.

The shock waves of these events spread around the country, and a reactionary movement was galvanized. By this week's election, 11 states had ballot initiatives defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman: that is, banning gay marriage, legal benefits and in many cases, even privileges associated with marriage like insurance benefits and hospital visits. Given that sexual orientation is a protected status under federal law and under the federal constitution (which grants equal protection to all people), this meant that these states voted to write discrimination into their constitutions.

The really interesting part is this, if you ask me. Everyone seems to acknowledge that gay sex will happen. Man will lay down with man and lady with lady and all that; nobody has ever stopped that and we all know they never will. What is being attacked through these initiatives is the relational aspect of homosexuality -- the credibility of the love that same-sex people feel for one another. And that is pretty twisted.

One year earlier, at the time the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that gay couples could indeed wed, George W. Bush first inserted himself into the debate. "Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman," he said in response to the court ruling. "Today's decision ... violates this important principle. I will work with congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage."

While many Democrats based their grassroots election campaign on organizing against the war in Iraq, and all its deception, atrocity and unbelievable expense, Republicans seized on the sanctity of marriage issue and ran with it. It became the basis of an all-out move to bring out the conservative vote, and it worked. People were rallied to stand up for a "sacred institution"; an "important principle"; doing what is "legally necessary" for the sanctity and purity of the American family.

On Nov. 2, 2004, the same day that shaming, sodomizing and sexually torturing innocent men, women and children in military gulags was endorsed by the American public, so too was banning homosexual marriage in the states of Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and -- the big surprise -- Oregon.

In states where the initiative was not on the ballot, Bush was portrayed as the man who would protect the people from the depraved immorality that began, of all places, in Massachusetts, where John Kerry happens to hail from. If I were taking a conspiracy theory track in this article, I would ponder how that little coincidence came to be -- my somewhat devious mind has already come up with a few possibilities -- but for now let's call it an accident of nature and a twist of fate.

As the dust and haze around Tuesday's election began to clear, U.S. newspapers were attempting to sort out what happened. Many of them were saying that the election was decided on what was pretty much seen as the Republican ace in the hole: morality.

People wanted morality, so they voted Republican.

Morality is big business in America these days. One of its most widespread programs is something called Abstinence Only Sex Education, which teaches young students that birth control does not work, and has them sign a pledge that they will remain totally abstinent from sex until heterosexual marriage. This commitment is made as their hormones and erotic curiosity are coming up to a mind-bending full-throttle. Homosexuality is banned from the discussion, and students who ask about it are even told to seek advice from ministers -- creating deep conflict and a sense of alienation in those who are either gay, or who come from gay homes. Homosexual experimentation is VERY common in adolescents, and these formative erotic experiences can become deeply corrupted with a poisonous dose of shame and self-doubt. This is very mean, and the damage can be permanent, and is delivered with the force of authority.

Only one state does not accept federal money for this program, California, where a state law mandates that sex education be consistent with the findings of science. Yet AO sex 'education' is taught in the other 49 states.

Morality. I talk about politics with quite a few people, and I've been surprised a few times to hear, even recently, about how angry some people still are at Bill Clinton for his hanky-panky with Monica Lewinsky. Genuinely angry; indignant; the level of concern was startling to me.

I was someone who at the time thought the whole issue was best settled privately and in an adult way between Bill, Hillary and Monica, and that it was not necessary to bring in the entire American public, congress and most of the world. However, Bill's affair with Monica became the subject of the second-ever impeachment of a United States president. We were told he was being impeached for lying, which is beyond absurd because traditionally, one of the first job requirements, and survival skills, of any politician is the ability to lie and deny. So at the very least, the impeachment was the height of hypocrisy on that basis. And it is scientifically established (by Kinsey, et al) that the more money men have, the more they lie about sex. (There were other hypocrisies, including a never-discussed sex scandal involving congressional pages [young interns, male and female] in the official private bedrooms of many United States senators in the 1980s.)

Putting sex on open trial was a big moment for America. At the time, the economy was going well, the country was not in any major wars, and life was pretty simple by today's standards. It was so simple, in fact, that we could all sit spellbound as the Chief Justice of the United States descended from his high throne, passed through the Corinthian columns of the Supreme Court, and presided over a trial with the entire House of Representatives sitting as the jury, about a woman sucking a man's penis.

Outside the United States, the world watched aghast, and very confused.

The backlash of this sexual crime was what, in large measure, led to George W. Bush having such a viable candidacy in 2000. He ran on the promise of restoring dignity to the Oral Office. What we got instead, among other things, was a program of sexual torture and carpet bombing against an enemy who did nothing to us. We also got the PATRIOT Act, which strips away numerous rights to privacy and civil rights; we get the promise of more wars against the Arab and Islamic people, which our grandchildren will be paying for; we get the promise of more lavishly funded anti-sex education programs and heterosexual marriage initiatives. And in the wake of Sept. 11, we are getting accustomed to living in the rising tide of a police state, where everything is done in the guise of national security, and defending the country against a foreign enemy. We hear a lot of rhetoric about freedom as we slip into the rigid patterns of fear and control.

A man named Wilhelm Reich has covered this territory in detail. Reich was a student of Freud, also a medical doctor and one of the first psychiatrists. It was Reich who put together two seemingly unrelated things: the banning or making-wrong of sex, and the rise of extreme political movements of a conservative bent. He was also an innovator in discovering cures for cancer, which work put him at war with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In his many books, Reich had a lot to say about Germany in the 1930s, a time when the purity of the family, banning birth control, stopping abortion, and the hatred of darker-skinned outsiders, were all major political themes used to rile up the public. This ball of fury led in a short time to an ethnic cleansing campaign called the Holocaust, which curiously happened in a modern, western industrial society. The historical parallel to America today is so chilling and so disturbing that I am reluctant to write about it. It is likely to be dismissed without a second thought, (once again) tossed into the dust bin as an irrelevant psychological theory.

But it's worth considering, if you're trying to put together a composite picture of the various trends in American culture and politics, the irrationality that our current political leaders spout, the rise of fundamentalist religion, and the relationship of all of this to your own personal growth and spiritual condition.

Reich introduced us to an idea that people have a drive for freedom, but also fear of the responsibilities that come with it. One potential compromise is struck when a way of having seeming freedom without personal responsibility is made available. This comes, Reich said, with the "willingness of the people to surrender to an authoritarian father figure." And with this comes the reward of being part of something bigger and more glorious than oneself. That is extremely appealing because it offers a sense of aggrandizement to people who otherwise tend to feel stupid, petty and irrelevant.

Such authority figures, he explained, are able to tap into an "undefined, nebulous but nevertheless extremely powerful longing" that exists within the mind of every human being. This longing is "the sense of something more" or the clue that God is real, or a deep calling to be free or powerful. It is also found in the cosmic yearning for sexual connection. It is made all the stronger by the holding down and restriction of sexual urges and desires -- effected mainly by turning sexual conduct into a moral issue (which is about control, not right and wrong). Today, both government and religion have made this a high priority. It is strengthened by mixing pleasure with guilt, shame and anxiety. This condition creates enormous inner conflict that itself must be held down at all costs. This in turn becomes a high-pressure storm within millions of people that can then be harvested in a society-wide movement toward control of every kind.

Are you tracking me here? Not so pleasant, I know.

There are other parts to this process. There happens at this time to be a much smaller, but vocal, liberationist movement afoot in the United States. There is some awareness that sex is natural, healthy and an act of freedom. People who live with these ideas get their message out -- and that message often resonates with people intuitively, even if they don't claim to accept the ideas. After all, sex is natural and people like to do it, no matter what they may say and how well they deny themselves pleasure. There is, as well, a lot of pornography and sexually-charged advertising which stirs up sexual desire and raises awareness of sexual need.

Yet after millennia of repression, of church and government authority forcing people to go against their deep nature -- and making that denial into second nature -- there can be "an irrational frenzy when [people] try to restore the fundamental biological function and are at the same time afraid of it."

Reich also had a pretty good grip on the problem of racism, which is directly related to this process. He suggests that people are dimly aware of a certain emotion of conflict within themselves, an emotion which contains this mix of the unacknowledged rage, guilt, shame, desire and sexual repression described in the paragraphs above.

Then, a charismatic or authoritarian leader comes along and gives that vague inner feeling of conflict a name -- for example, Arabs.

The name changes, but this hated, dreaded entity always exists outside yourself. The phenomenon, he said, is usually connected to someone darker than you are; darker people are usually the bearers of blame for lust, passion and primal urges. These darker people become the symbol of all we hate within ourselves, and that rage is projected outward in the form of culturally sanctioned torture and mass-murder.

Individual neurosis -- which is a kind of society-wide plague -- erupts as a storm of control, murder and war. Going with this feels 'safe', but in reality, it kills us.

This is a trick to dwarf the great illusions of Harry Houdini and David Copperfield, working on a vast scale. The sleight-of-mind is rarely seen for what it is. Who, after all, would connect a feeling of deeply private erotic shame and another seemingly unrelated feeling of hating Osama bin Laden? But if you multiply that erotic shame by a hundred million, provoke it with rage, and give it a collective expression and an evil face, it's a bit easier to imagine.

In Reichian terms, you could say that Osama bin Laden is the face of our shame and self-hatred.

It's also easier to imagine if you explore the depths of your own psyche and feel the intense power of the sexual darkness that is programmed into us. This programming happens practically every hour of the day, via television, in many other media, and in our social relations. It is dreadful to think of the effects of such programming happening in most every school in the country in the form of Abstinence Only Sex Education.

Those looking for a metaphor might consider the diesel engine. Combine pressure, heat and fuel and you can tap into the power of many small explosions, and you can drive a truck down the highway. Do those little pops inside the engine know what they are part of? Do we?

Reich was not a pessimist. He believed in people. He made his observations exclusively for the purpose of helping modern humanity heal its violent and self-loathing tendencies. He created healing techniques that got results. He also influenced a generation of thinkers, most of whom are forgotten by popular culture today but who made a big splash in the 1970s. This was called the Human Potential Movement. Behind our crisis of shame and emptiness, said Reich, in the depths of our being, resides "natural sociality and sexuality, spontaneous enjoyment of work, and capacity for love." Experiencing that is to express true human potential.

This, he said, is genuine freedom. Wilhelm Reich acknowledged that getting there is a perilous journey.

It takes experienced help. It is necessary to embrace one's inner chaos and some very confusing emotions on the way to reality. It is necessary to actually deal with one's sexuality and the blocks to pleasure that have been installed in our psyches. Those who embark on this process often find that their efforts are rebuffed by friends and loved ones who are unwilling to go through the changes, or simply threatened by anyone else doing so.

Yet for those who tune into the necessity to live an authentic life -- the desire to be free and not a robot, curious and not bored, loving rather than hateful or indifferent -- it's the way to reality. Fortunately, living ignorance is no longer our one option.

The first step is refusing to eat the fruit of the poison tree. ++

Scorpio Birthday & Scorpio Rising, part three

We are now in the last week before the Scorpio New Moon, an event significant in the life of anyone born under the sign of the Eagle and the Scorpion. For clarity, though, this birthday report will cover through the New Moon and next week's edition will cover those born in the days following the lunation. The material here may resonate or not regardless of your birthday, and I suggest that Scorpio rising have a look as well, as some of the transits will relate to your chart by virtue of house position.

By far the most salient feature of the charts this week is a rare stirring-up or settling-down of energy in Libra, your 12th solar house. The 12th solar house is the sign prior to any sign, which in the case of Scorpio is Libra. It is one of the most sensitive angles of any chart, usually because its themes and events are typically functioning well below the level of consciousness, out of awareness. It is a good place to seek information about what, specifically, is going on in the blind spots of the mind, the psyche and the senses. And it's also a difficult place to define: the private cosmos within each of us, with all its mystery, foggy nebulae and seeming paradox.

The 12th house reveals its information in subtle ways, such as through dreams or déjà vu. We can have moments of transcendent revelation, psychic contact, a sense of unification or of opening up within ourselves. One aspect of the 12th house is that the information that arrives from this plane of awareness is deniable; that is, we can leave it behind just like we can forget or evade a morning dream. Or, for that matter, how we can evade or avoid a living dream, a desire for what we want from life. One of the main factors working will be fear, and the 12th house is notorious for that: fear of all things hidden, fear of enemies, fear of surrender, fear of the pleasures of the bed, fear of loss, and most of all the fear of death.

Most of the time, our forebrains, a little computer located above the eyes, shut down the information coming from this realm, and suppress the irrational side of our nature. But besides being irrational, it is that which connects us to the much larger world, and thus it is a powerful house. If you want an example of someone with many natal planets in the 12th house, consider Madonna.

Yet as I've been suggesting, it's also the house that is the most difficult and uncomfortable to grasp. As a result, what often happens in this life -- that is, in the industrial western world -- is that people become prisoners of their own unconscious, where unruly forces hold tremendous sway and seem best left out of awareness. But they are no less powerful for being trapped; in fact, they can be all the more intense, aggressive or even ruthless. And when these ideas and feelings emerge, the result can be a profound change in one's entire psychic and psychological orientation.

The astrology of the forthcoming seven or eight days will do much to brings these matters to the surface and in doing so set you free -- if you maintain an unusual level of vigilance about what you are feeling, dreaming and experiencing.

In a variety of other forums, I've made reference to a series of occultations of planets by the Moon that occurs between Nov. 9 and 14. There are four of these events in a tight cluster; the first three occur in Libra (your 12th solar house), and the fourth occurs in Sagittarius (your 2nd solar house). In between, there is a New Moon in your sign. So, follow the sequence, and then I will move into some interpretation: The Moon enters Libra on the 9th, makes exact occutations to Jupiter, Venus and Mars; then it enters your 1st solar house (your sign or ascendant, Scorpio), forms a New Moon on the 12th and then makes a fourth occultation to Mercury in Sagittarius.

That is one very busy Moon.

I was meditating on all this a moment ago and this is what I got: How would you respond if someone actually showed up for you, and was fully present emotionally? How would you feel if someone -- that is, someone you could relate to -- recognized your innermost properties and then related to you directly? I'm somewhat familiar with the state of affairs on our planet and I know that most people, when approached with authentic feeling, do a fast disappearing act.

The same thing often occurs when real feeling or new reality of any kind emerges from within oneself. This can be unsettling and destabilizing. A fairly typical response is to deny that new reality and then retreat into the familiar patterns of existence, and call it good. Moon occulting Libra planets like that is likely to reveal to you exactly how you feel about certain people, events, relationships and situations. It is likely to raise to question your sense of commitment, and may even prompt you to recognize the truly awesome depth OF your commitments. And you are likely to have a sudden view of all that you fear, and be compelled to decide whether that fear is warranted, grounded in reality, or just paranoid fantasy or psychological garbage.

How would it feel not to disappear, to not shrink into denial of these things? How would it feel, instead, to emerge? There would be a kind of confrontation involved, in the best sense of that word. That confrontation -- a meeting within yourself, and a meeting with others -- would likely prompt a profound renewal of your sense of identity. There would be a kind of missing experience that shook up your sense of reality, and a change of heart and mind that was distinct, noticeable and which gave it a solid, stable place in your life.

The last step -- I refer here to Moon occult Mercury in Sagittarius -- a reassessment of your sense of worth and value in the world. This is the theme of the 2nd house. One implication of this message is recognizing that not everyone likes you, but some people like you quite a lot. To embrace one of these realities is to embrace the other. Not everyone needs to like you, and that doesn't mean they can do you any harm.

These are genuinely unusual transits. They are joined, by the way, with the emergence of Mars into your sign, which adds one last ingredient that should, through all these changes, leave you feeling more like you can sense, be and express who you are more than any other time in recent years. And because this astrology happens around the time of your birthday, it is a microcosm of the story of the next four seasons.

Meanwhile, a lot will emerge between now and the 14th, things that none of us can see coming, though at least we have the astrology to remind us to pay attention, watch our timing and respond consciously to what we are presented with.

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ELECTION NEWS

I have done a recap and preview of the astrology of the presidential election at Cainer.com in the introduction to my weekly Q & A column there. Instead of using bandwidth and reprinting it here, I offer the link. There is plenty of other interesting information at Cainer.com and the best daily horoscopes available anywhere.

http://cainer.com/ericfrancis/eric.html

Planet Waves Horoscope
by Eric Francis

Aries (March 20-April 19)
Larger than life is the best way I can describe your personal story right now. Some would say surreal. In any event, you're someplace you've never been before, feeling what you've never felt. Love may be joyous, bursting with potential, and seemingly complicated by the possibility of two people in the picture. Can you stand it? I hope you can. All that could stop you from being yourself and enjoying this unusual journey is guilt -- or dreaded jealousy. Some find it easier to get over these feelings than others. Get over it, and by the way, there's no such thing as 'straight'.

Taurus (April 19-May 20)
Give it time. It's clear that you're working on achieving something you know is difficult and may be out of your league. But there are factors you're not considering yet, and they may take some time to arise. It would be far better to move gently and with greater pleasure in your work than to force a particular issue that's going to resolve itself anyway. What issue? I would say none other than the most difficult one you envision. Big problems are a good candidate for miracles, though first you just have to trust.

Gemini (May 20-June 21)
There may be a question of what to do when you happen to notice that the dark possibilities you see in others also exist in yourself. The answer is likely to be nothing at all. The mere observation is usually enough for the purposes of growth and awareness. We need to live with all possibilities, and when we see the negative ones we can relate that much more easily to the positive ones as well: that is, the potential to succeed in unusual ways, even those we didn't consider ourselves capable of till it actually happens.

Cancer (June 21-July 22)
Forget the possibility of going back to who you were. That's out of the question, and I suggest you throw a party in your own honor. Now you have become the force for change. This may not be so obvious to you, particularly given that you're involved with forces and people who seem so much larger and more experienced than you are. Yet don't doubt the source of your confidence, or the strength that emotional stability is offering you. That confidence and strength can add up to a lot of happiness and success.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23)
Life is always better when you sort out truth from lies. When we're really living, it's necessary to do a little of this every day. You are currently working on taking apart one of the bigger chunks of unreality that has pestered you for some time. You may be wondering how it's possible to know you're doing this for sure. I would say that when you feel closer to the people around you at the exact same time you know you're hiding nothing from them, you're well on the way. The feeling is freedom.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
Much that was previously just an idea has come to manifestation in your life. It seems, as well, that developments have more than compensated for losses you encountered some time in the recent past. So don't hold onto any grudges. You've got too much to live for, and the adventure of life is just too good to squander on petty issues. Great things are calling you, as are great people. The one thing you have every reason to believe in is that you possess the resources and creativity to achieve not just great things, but original and beautiful things.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23)
So much has happened the past few weeks there's been no accounting for it, much less time to tell yourself the story. The changes are going to keep coming, waterfall-style. And it will seem to take everything you've got to keep adapting. With each big shift, you'll feel like a new person. Given your tendency to prefer a stable, balanced situation, this pace of progress may be challenging. But change has been long overdue, and it's easier to get it all overwith at once. So hang loose, and notice as your perspective changes every day. Because that's the main thing in motion.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
I would love to have a periscope into the world of your dreams. They must be pretty interesting, with moments of transcendent beauty. Right now your dreams are giving you a clue as to what is truly possible for you. They also may be sounding a bell, warning you of how much is going to rearrange itself how soon before those changes can happen. Do you feel the presence of a guardian angel or two standing over you? I thought so. You have no reason to fear the future, which should give you a bit more freedom to enjoy this moment.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 - Dec. 22)
This season will go down in history as one of the most socially creative in many years time. You are gaining what some would call a magic touch. Be aware that people see you as their potential benefactor; you are clearly being perceived as having something rare that they feel they lack. Your job is to prove that they don't. But before that, you may as well play the part of one whose life is a gift to the community. Don't bother wondering how it's possible. Just give it a try. You have so much to offer; you'll see.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20)
Over the next couple of months things will not proceed according to your plans at work. At the end of which, you'll be in line for some serious congratulations, because your plans are not quite up to your potential. There will be some visionary Capricorns among you who get the message and make revisions early on, and get on the right track. The rest will be guided by circumstances -- pretty wild ones, actually. Just remember that each time reality starts to wiggle, tumble or go out of control, that's the clear invitation to opportunity. And yes, things go better when you're the boss.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19)
If your inspiration is coming from mysterious origins, you can count on the creative energy to make your dreams real coming from an equally mysterious source. Just give up the habit of making a heavy effort. You wear yourself down and miss the many opportunities for creative solutions that are right within reach. This is one of those times when every job should be half as easy as you think, and every solution will be in the same room as the problem. That is, as long as you remember, and don't feel like a fool for looking.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20)
The next couple of months are a great time to establish yourself anywhere and in anything that you desire -- the operative word there being desire. This is, alternately, not a time to be guided by obligation or a sense of responsibility, or to let yourself be goaded by the fear and insecurity so common to Pisces. What you fear the most is really opportunity opening up. You may want to make an inquiry as to why you would ever hold back your own potential. But I don't suggest wasting too much time on psychoanalysis when life itself is calling your name.

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