Extreme Thoughts

There are no straight lines in the zodiac or in planetary movement. There are cycles, some so huge that we never, in one lifetime, return to the point in the cycle from which we set out as a living being. Others, such as the cycles of the Moon, come around many times, even in a comparatively short lifetime.

In the circle of the zodiac, around which our planets and lights travel, the first and last signs are opposites, they are also neighbours. Aries, the initiator, full of energy, impatient to get things started; nextdoor is Pisces the loose, visionary dreamer in no hurry to "haul ass".

Circles don't have extremities, only departure and return points, which means that extremes flow into one another.

What follows one extreme is the other extreme - not moderation of either.

In the case of political opinion, the further left or right one moves in entrenched viewpoints, the more liable one is, without even realising it, to be assisting the very causes one started out opposing. For example: the more extreme right-wing, totalitarian or fascist a government becomes, what follows eventually will reflect the other extreme: revolution, extreme left-wing reaction.


Extreme right and extreme left are neighbours in the political circle of opinion, just as Aries and Pisces are neighbours in the astrological zodiac. I am not comparing those signs to political viewpoints, only illustrating how extremes are liable to produce an effect which can, taken far enough, turn out to have aided the rival viewpoint.

"Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left." ~ Clint Eastwood
(Interview, Time Magazine, February 20, 2005)

TREE MEMORIES

May 29, aka Oak Apple Day or Royal Oak Day in Britain is the anniversary of the Restoration of the Monarchy (1660). It was the date (according to the Julian calendar) when King Charles II returned to London after years of exile, during the rule of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector.

"Parliament had ordered the 29th of May, the King’s birthday, to be forever kept as a day of thanksgiving for our redemption from tyranny and the King’s return to his Government, he returning to London that day."
From the diary of Samuel Pepys, June 1, 1660.

The day used to be commemorated by the wearing of oak apples or oak leaves, recalling the Boscobel oak in which Charles II hid after the battle of Worcester. Numerous British pubs have names recalling the event (see right).
29 May was also the birthday of Charles II, but when converted to the Gregorian calendar his date of birth for astrological purposes becomes June 8 - still with Sun in Gemini. Astrodatabank has his natal chart HERE.

Chambers' Book of Days tells this about the King with Sun in Gemini:

It is a great pity that Charles II was so dissolute, and so reckless of the duties of his high station, for his life was an interesting one in many respects; and, after all, the national joy attending his restoration, and his cheerfulness, wit, and good-nature, give him a rather pleasant association with English history. His parents, Charles I and Henrietta Maria (daughter of Henry IV of France), who had been married in 1626, had a child named Charles James born to them in March 1629, but who did not live above a day. Their second infant, who was destined to live and to reign, saw the light on the 29th of May 1630, his birth being distinguished by the appearance, it was said, of a star at midday.



It was on his thirtieth birthday, the 29th of May 1660, that the distresses and vicissitudes of his early life were closed by his triumphal entry as king into London.

All of which allows a (somewhat contrived) segue into a ramble about the trees, past and present in our yards. Yards, by the way, is the term used in the USA for lawn areas or gardens in front of, and behind the house. In the UK "yard" usually refers to a concreted area, often called "the backyard" behind modestly sized, older style homes.

When, in early 2005, we moved into the house where we now live a big part of the attraction was its location. It's on the edge of town, necessities within easy reach, yet countryside lies just beyond the backyard fence, as husband's photograph (above), taken from the kitchen window, shows. Some lovely old shady Cottonwood trees stood inside the back fence, as well as two big Maples at the front of the house. I suspect that before a road and houses were constructed, the three huge trees in our backyard formed a semi-circle with three others in the pasture beyond our fence. Perhaps they were planted as part of the concerted effort, led by the government, to protect and change the face of a barren Oklahoma after the dust-bowl era of the 1930s.


Sadly, "old" often gets the better of "shady".

In 2009 one of the three huge Cottonwoods had to go. Cottonwoods, in old age, are apparently prone to atttack by borer beetles and disease. We resisted the loss for as long as seemed safe, but the thought of a wild winter and next tornado season overtook any sentimental meanderings. Last year another Cottonwood, badly damaged by an ice storm had to be taken down as it had become dangerous to the house, and the house nextdoor.





There's bad news this year too. One of the two tall Maples in front of the house was killed off by last year's drought. It'll have to go. We'll plant a young Cottonwood later to replace it.

A rotting Mimosa tree had to be removed from the back, then an old decaying fruit tree. Three years ago we planted a Crape Myrtle to replace the lost Mimosa tree. At the same time we also planted a small Smoke Tree in the front yard - very pretty little tree, I can't find our photograph of it. Both survived ice storms and other wild weather events, but last year's protracted drought and record high temperatures for weeks on end killed both, in spite of frequent watering.

Both Crape Myrtle and Smoke Tree had to be cut down, but have left us with some hope. New shoots appeared, and are now growing. The heat had killed only what was above-ground.












We hope for less extreme temperatures this summer, or at least for no extended period of drought, to give the new growths a chance.

Music Monday ~ John Fogerty

Today's the birthday of John Fogerty, vocalist, guitarist and songwriter, formerly of the famous 1970s band Creedence Clearwater Revival (aka CCR), photograph below. I'm glad that I can feature this artist today, Memorial Day. He's a songwriter who has made his feelings clear about war. Here for instance:
I Can't Take It No More

Stop talking about staying the course
You keep a-beating that old dead horse
You know you lied about how we went to war
I Can't Take It No More

AND

Deja Vu
Did you hear 'em talkin' 'bout it on the radio
Did you try to read the writing on the wall
Did that voice inside you say I've heard it all before
It's like Deja Vu all over again

Day by day I hear the voices rising
Started with a whisper like it did before
Day by day we count the dead and dying
Ship the bodies home while the networks all keep score

Did you hear 'em talkin' 'bout it on the radio
Could your eyes believe the writing on the wall
Did that voice inside you say I've heard it all before
It's like Deja Vu all over again.

I, along with most of my generation on both sides of the Atlantic, am familiar with his many hit songs: Proud Mary, Bad Moon Rising, Rockin' All Over the World, Lodi etc. - whether sung by him or covered by others (eg Tina Turner, Status Quo).






Fogerty's musical style, according to music critics, can be described by any combination from the following list: swamp, roots, rock, country, blues, folk, gospel - throw in operetta and that'd be a full house! What the heck is "swamp"? I guess it's music of the Louisiana swamps.....so cajun must be added to that list, though nothing of his I've sampled has been quite that swampy.

Fogerty's star burned brightly for around three years in the early 1970s, along with CCR's, but the band disintegrated. Accusations of jealousy and betrayal were followed by years of litigation.

From Reclaiming My Voice at the Daily Beast website ~

Fogerty:

.............. By the mid-1980s the emotional and financial toll of fighting these battles for so long came to a head. One day I was giving yet another deposition and found myself so angry that I couldn't remember my own address or telephone number! I remember going into a department store and being so fearful and dysfunctional that I could not ask a salesperson about buying a pair of socks. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't feel. Music was who I was and I could not understand why or how I could lose so much.

He withdrew from the music scene completely for several years, eventually returned with solo albums. At first he refused to perform CCR songs live, but began to do so again at a benefit concert for Vietnam Veterans, who made up much of the generation for whom his songs became the story of their lives. He said, in interview "Gradually I realized that these were not just my songs anymore."

Many of Fogerty's songs address important social issues. Though these originally related to events during a particular slice of time, they remain relevant, and timeless. Examples:


Fortunate Son A song written in part due to a response about Eisenhower's grandson marrying Nixon's daughter. It was meant to symbolize the frustrations by the common man, just drafted. During the Vietnam War, 234 sons of Congressman were drafted. Out of the 234, only 28 were actually sent to Vietnam and zero were killed.

Some folks are born made to wave the flag,
Ooh, they're red, white and blue.
And when the band plays "Hail to the chief",
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord,

It ain't me, it ain't me,
I ain't no senator's son, son.
It ain't me, it ain't me;
I ain't no fortunate one, no,


Who'll Stop the Rain
(2 verses)
Long as I remember the rain been comin' down
Clouds of mystery pourin' confusion on the ground.
Good men through the ages tryin' to find the sun.
And I wonder still I wonder who'll stop the rain.

I went down Virginia seekin' shelter from the storm
Caught up in the fable I watched the tower grow
Five year plans and new deals wrapped in golden chains.
And I wonder still I wonder who'll stop the rain.


Long Dark Night , relates to Hurricane Katrina and President G. W. Bush


I'll embed my own, non-political, favourite, Lodi, from the 1970s:

I'm Stuck in Lodi Again.....




ASTROLOGY

John Fogerty's natal chart with data from Astrodatabank



Once again, I don't have far to seek to find rebellion against the establishment - Sun conjunct Uranus (planet of rebellion and revolution, change and the avant garde).
Don't need to say much more than that!

If pressed I might add that there's an opposition from Capricorn Moon (inner self) to Capricorn's ruling planet Saturn (business matters, restriction, limitation) in Cancer, linking to two square (inharmonious) aspects with Neptune (creativity) in Libra. This makes up what astrologers call a T-square, though to be an unstable, stressful aspect pattern but can also act as "a prod" to effectivness and dynamism. The signs involved in thsi T-square are cardinal signs, making the configuration extra-dynamic, a need to act at once - patience is not usually in an individual with this configuration in their natal chart. the planets and signs involved do fit the general "feel" and pattern of Fogerty's career.

POSTSCRIPT ~~~ After drafting this post and adding tags I noticed that I'd written about John Fogerty before, in 2007, after hearing him sing on a late night TV talk show. Dang! Never mind! Anyway, here's a link to the 2007 post: John Fogerty's Revival. There's more detail in that post on his wonderfully rebellious nature.

PPS ~ Also after drafting the post I saw John Fogerty perform on the American Idol finale show last Wednesday evening, singing with Phillip Phillips who was later announced as this season's American Idol.


Congratulations to both are in order:

Happy Birthday John Fogerty, and thanks for those wonderful songs!

Congratulations Phillip Phillips, and good wishes for quick recovery after surgery!

MEMORIAL

Tomorrow will be Memorial Day in the United States. I find it difficult - well nigh impossible - to write a paragraph or two on the topic of current US wars without losing my temper and raising my blood pressure, so I mostly avoid mention. Because tomorrow ought not to pass without notice, I'm taking the liberty of copying a few paragraphs by Tom Engelhardt from his recent piece:



How to Forget on Memorial Day by Tom Engelhardt

.......On this Memorial Day, there will undoubtedly be much cant in the form of tributes to “our heroes” and then, Tuesday morning, when the mangled cars have been towed away, the barbeque grills cleaned, and the “heroes” set aside, the forgetting will continue. If the Obama administration has its way and American special operations forces, trainers, and advisors in reduced but still significant numbers remain in Afghanistan until perhaps 2024, we have more than another decade of forgetting ahead of us in a tragedy that will, by then, be beyond all comprehension.

Afghanistan has often enough been called “the graveyard of empires.” Americans have made it a habit to whistle past that graveyard, looking the other way -- a form of obliviousness much aided by the fact that the American war dead conveniently come from the less well known or forgotten places in our country. They are so much easier to ignore thanks to that.

Except in their hometowns, how easy the war dead are to forget in an era when corporations go to war but Americans largely don’t. So far, 1,980 American military personnel (and significant but largely unacknowledged numbers of private contractors) have died in Afghanistan, as have 1,028 NATO and allied troops, and (despite U.N. efforts to count them) unknown but staggering numbers of Afghans. (My highlight)

So far in the month of May, 22 American dead have been listed in those Pentagon announcements. If you want a little memorial to a war that shouldn’t be, check out their hometowns and you'll experience a kind of modern graveyard poetry. Consider it an elegy to the dead of second- or third-tier cities, suburbs, and small towns whose names are resonant exactly because they are part of your country, but seldom or never heard by you.

Here, then, on this Memorial Day, are not the names of the May dead, but of their hometowns, announcement by announcement, placed at the graveside of a war that we can’t bear to remember and that simply won’t go away. If it’s the undead of wars, the deaths from it remain a quiet crime against American humanity:

Spencerport, New York
Wichita, Kansas
Warren, Arkansas
West Chester, Ohio
Alameda, California
Charlotte, North Carolina
Stow, Ohio
Clarksville, Tennessee
Chico, California
Jeffersonville, Kentucky
Yuma, Arizona
Normangee, Texas
Round Rock, Texas
Rolla, Missouri
Lucerne Valley, California
Las Cruses, New Mexico
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Overland Park, Kansas
Wheaton, Illinois
Lawton, Oklahoma
Prince George, Virginia
Terre Haute, Indiana.

As long as the hometowns pile up, no one should rest in peace.

Hear hear! Thank you Mr. Engelhardt.

Au Revoir, Mr. Untouchable.

One public figure in the United States I can admire without reservation (and there are precious few) is US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. He has been in the news once more this week, this time announcing his decision to step down from his post in Northern District of Illinois after a stint of 11 years. From the end of June he intends to take the summer off before considering other job possibilities.
(Photo: Getty Images)

His 24-year, often high profile, career has included prosecuting terrorists, mob members, corrupt governors and a presidential aide - we can only guess at what job offers might be forthcoming. Possibilities mentioned here and there on the net would be to replace the current FBI director whose term will end in September 2013, or U.S. attorney general under a new administration.

Mr.Fitzgerald has never made his own political leanings known. He prosecuted Republican Governor George Ryan and Governor Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, with equal zeal.

On Thursday, speaking to reporters he said, "For the office, it's important that there be change. I thought this was the right time." Asked about future plans, "I don't know, and that's sincere," he told reporters. "Public service is in my blood."
(Photograph: Chicago Sun Times)

Fitzgerald's parents came from Ireland's County Clare, they met in the United States, raised their son in Flatbush and guided him to a scholarship at a Jesuit high school. He worked as a school janitor in Brooklyn to make money for college and spent summers opening doors at an upscale co-op building on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. His father worked at a building on East 75th. Fitzgerald says he remembers where he came from and pinches himself when he realizes where he is. "The values we grew up with were straight-ahead. We didn't grow up in a household where people were anything but direct," Fitzgerald says.

I've posted before about Patrick Fitzgerald -this comes from a 2008 post....

A writer called Fitzgerald an "Untouchable", in the mould of Eliot Ness ."The Prosecutor Never Rests", an article by Peter Slevin from 2005 gives a flavour of Patrick Fitzgerald's personality.

"His thoroughness, his relentlessness, his work ethic are legendary," says terrorism expert Daniel Benjamin, a former member of the National Security Council.

Seeing Fitzgerald in action, says Los Angeles lawyer Anthony Bouza, a college classmate, is "like watching a sophisticated machine." Colleagues speak in head-shaking tones of Fitzgerald's skills in taking a case to trial. A Phi Beta Kappa math and economics student at Amherst before earning a Harvard law degree in 1985, he has a gift for solving puzzles and simplifying complexity for a jury."

"The staff of the 9/11 commission called him one of the world's best terrorism prosecutors. He convicted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and all four defendants in the embassy bombings, which had left 224 people dead. He extracted a guilty plea from Mafia capo John Gambino and became an authority on bin Laden, whom he indicted in 1998 for a global terrorist conspiracy that included the African bombings"

"People who know Fitzgerald describe him as anything but a stuffed shirt. During a key moment in one New York trial, he slipped a note to his co-counsel, who interrupted questioning to read it to himself. It said, "Is there beer in the fridge?""

"He's no slouch at stagecraft, either. At the trial of a Mafia hit man, the defense argued that a ski mask -- part of what Fitzgerald called a "hit kit" that included surgical gloves, a gun and hollow-point bullets -- was really just a hat. (The defense also said the surgical gloves were for putting ointment on the defendant's ailing dog.) During closing arguments, Fitzgerald startled the jury by rolling up one leg on his lawyerly dark suit. "These are just shorts, ladies and gentlemen," he said, according to one account. "These are just shorts."

Chart above is set for 12 noon as no time of birth is known.

I was confident I'd find Saturn and/or Capricorn very prominent in Fitzgerald's natal chart, and I wasn't wrong.

Sun, Jupiter and Saturn itself are all in Capricorn. Saturn is ruler of Capricorn, both are connected to law, as is Jupiter. Saturn and Capricorn represent the discipline, rules, and structures of law. Jupiter and its sign of rulership, Sagittarius represent the judgement and philosophical aspect of law and justice.
Very apt - and evidence of astrology in action - again!

Mercury at 22 Sagittarius harmoniously trines (120*) Uranus at 25 Leo - Intuitive mind with independence of thought - somewhat ahead of his own time.

Mars at 11 Cancer exactly opposes Jupiter at 11 Capricorn - indication that he seeks out challenges, has to temper a tendency to go over the top at times, but because Saturn is positioned close to Jupiter, such tendencies are held in check, and emanate in Fitzgerald's case mainly as the excess zeal for which he is famous and occasionally criticised.

The Moon's position can't be pinpointed without time of birth, but it would lie somewhere between 22 Aquarius and 6 Pisces. If born before noon (my bet) it was in Aquarius, along with his natal Venus. Analysis is key to his work, and that's a strongly Aquarian trait.

This is the kind of guy we need as president, but as long as he returns to some public office, it'll feel reassuring that good things and good people do happen here.... sometimes.