Among the ancient gods, Pluto was both necessary and unwelcome. Somebody had to rule the underworld, especially because of the precious metals buried there. But having Gloomy Gus Pluto remain out of sight was fine with everyone, including him. He took little interest in human affairs, could only snag a wife through kidnapping, and kept company with things humans preferred to suppress, all those distasteful, ugly, painful reminders that we humans are sometimes, often, not very nice.
Pluto was the god who ruled over death, transformation, and
rebirth, and he is associated with the discovery (un-earthing) of unconscious,
hidden elements—not the best portfolio for winning a popularity contest. Pluto
stands by as things are dug up, exposed, viewed, and acknowledged as real, whether
charming or repulsive. Today, Pluto would be the god of colonic irrigations.
This year, 2022, the U.S. of A. celebrates its Pluto Return
because the dwarf planet takes 246 years to orbit the sun. It’s right back
where it sat in our sky in 1776, so no wonder every he or she or theyx is
thinking about the moment of our national creation and its associated myths.
The Supreme Court’s Catholic majority has one version; the 1619 Project
another; the neocons busily redrawing the map of Europe, theirs.
A Fourth of July random massacre, then, as occurred in
Highland Park last week, is a fitting Pluto Return moment. Not only was the
holiday not exempt from our nation’s relentless compulsion to engage in random shoot-ups,
last week’s edition was a virtual sacralization of it—a mystical union between
the political entity on its own birthday and the method by which it brought
itself about.
We came into being through force, including the strategic use
of slaughter; we expanded through more of the same; and we have now come up
against the limits of our force capacity just in time for a returning Pluto to expose
the sordid underpinnings of how we possess this subcontinent and the reach of
our supposed suzerainty over the entire world.
Viewed most superficially, Pluto returns as a war unfolds in
Ukraine; layered atop it is another war, economic in nature; the two nestle in
the swaddling clothes of competing ideologies that stage their own gladiatorial
tournaments in the propaganda battles raging through cable channels, uploaded
videos, reportage (such as it is), and windy think thank articles.
Struck dumb and blind, our chosen authorities insist on
making all three wars worse: the longer the shooting war continues, the less
there will be left of Ukraine. The neutron bomb of sanctions has boomeranged and
landed explosively into the wobbling debt-o-sphere of our financialized western
economies; and even the propaganda war, so deftly conducted by our
division-strength phalanx of persuaders, will backfire when the depth of their
duplicity becomes impossible to ignore.
And yet, there are other buried aspects to be uncovered
about the moment of our national fertilization. At that instant when our
American zygote sprang forth from the wiggling fishies of the founding dads
implanted into the moist soils of the colonies, the populace dared to throw off
the shackles of monarchy. A republic, imperfect and hypocritical, was born,
with dubious possibilities for survival. And yet, it did.
So, despite the nasty parts of our Pluto story, other, less
sanguinary impulses are also part of our founding DNA. We made a unique claim
of citizen equality—within limits, of course, but still. While the enslavement
and/or elimination of those not born into the privileged clans belied the
foundational principle, nonetheless it emerged in 1776, right here on this soil.
It resurfaced periodically as the polity absorbed, reluctantly and imperfectly,
some of those it had brutally excluded.
Another foundational principle was quickly articulated by
the earliest Americans—to confine our bloody business to the New World and not
“go abroad to slay dragons [we] do not understand,” in the rarely remembered
words of John Quincy Adams. The wisdom of that sentiment has long been buried, and
no one is less interested in acknowledging it than the neocons ruling at
Washington, London, and Brussels, determined to do the exact opposite. Yet,
there it lies buried, ready to be exposed to the light of day.
It is often alleged that the neocon cabal that has seized
control of our foreign policy establishment originated in a core group of individuals inspired more by the ideas of Trotsky than those of Madison or
Franklin. Whether or not the Nulands and Sullivans and Kagans and Blinkens call
their ideology “permanent revolution” or "spreading democracy," they carry on their crusades with the unshakeable
faith of a self-appointed vanguard convinced that one more blow to the enemy
will transform the world. For them, no sacrifice is too great to
bring on the Millenium. The war in Ukraine not going so well? Start a new one
over Taiwan. Encourage the Israelis to launch an attack on Iran. Double down,
never admit error, never admit defeat, and escalate.
In their bubble world, failure can never result from their playbook. Unlike Trotsky or indeed any rational being, they have no concept of strategic retreat. In the current case, the U.S. populace, shielded from dissenting views, accepts that the war is going tolerably well and, at worst, will descend into a lengthy stalemate. But the rosy predictions of our propagandists are more faithful to their fanciful ideals than to stubborn factoids.
Sooner rather than later, IMNSHO, Russia will dictate
the terms of surrender in Ukraine, and the “rules-based international order”
(i.e., “we make the rules, and you follow the orders”) will implode. Back at
home, the Republican autocrats will blame it all on Biden and install
themselves more or less permanently in power as they rip up the rulebooks of
1776 and 1865.
We are on the cusp of a major rearrangement of our world. Pluto’s
Return promises to be full of revelations—and perhaps death and rebirth as
well.
