Overview
When evaluating a politician, one way to get past the spin and see the real person is to look at their birth chart. In my article Evaluating Politicians I present an approach we can use to determine the extent to which the person approaches life and their social role in a whole and integrated manner or in a fragmented, fear-based manner. We view the person's expressed positions, policies, attitudes and beliefs as manifestations of the various archetypes in their chart, and look for both alienated and over-emphasized archetypes.Specifically, we assess how flexible and integrating their manifestation of Saturn is, or conversely how rigid and defensive it is. Further, we look at the balance between their expression of South and North Nodes. If the individual expresses the archetypes of their South Node either exclusively or much more strongly than those of their North Node, this imbalance suggests the South Node is being used to avoid facing Saturnian fears (see Your Archetypal Self for an extensive exploration of this model of the psyche).
In this article we will use the model to look at George W. Bush's personality or psyche. His most obvious and striking characteristics are expressions of his South Node. This is not a good sign; it suggests deep, underlying Saturnian fears. We will thus begin our exploration with George's twelfth house, which contains his Sun and Saturn, and then look at his defensive strategies using his South Node. We will finish by placing George's personal drama into a wider perspective.
The Twelfth House
The twelfth house is the house of essence. Here the psyche tends to experience all manifested forms as arbitrary, transitory, and superficial. They are seen through. "The Emperor has no clothes", at least none that have any fundamental reality. Boundaries are porous, definitions ambiguous. The only reality is essence - the existential center of an entity, beyond any particular manifestation.The twelfth is also called the house of the unconscious - that part of the psyche that can tune into essence. Call it the imagination or intuition, this fluid part of our mind provides many important abilities, two of which are relevant to our current discussion. Because it can see past the distinctions and boundaries that define the different entities in our world, the twelfth house psyche can perceive the underlying connection or unity of things. Further, because it recognizes that the form of an entity is simply its current manifestation, the psyche can allow the form to change.
Sun in the Twelfth House
Any planet in the twelfth house is directly connected to the unconscious and operates within this domain of essence. In practical terms this means that a twelfth house planet represents an aspect of the individual's psyche that is sensitive to, impacted by, and tends to merge with the psyches of others. The normal separate functioning of the psyche is weakened here; its ability to connect to and identify with others is strengthened.George W. Bush has two planets in the twelfth house - Saturn and the Sun. The Sun is the energetic center of the psyche, the conduit through which the individual essence manifests. It is thus simultaneously the source of physical vitality and the core of the individual identity. The Solar energy forcefully pushes outwards, filling the space around it with itself. It is the will to be who and what one is.
When the Sun is in the twelfth house, its individual identity is weakened. Because it is so connected to essence, it has trouble differentiating itself from others. It is hard to know where it ends and the other begins. There is a tendency to confuse their energy with its own, their identity with its own. It is thus less an individual in its own right and more a particular manifestation of its archetypal environment.
Sun in Cancer in the Twelfth House
George's twelfth house Sun is in Cancer, the sign of the family. The center of his psyche deeply identified with, indeed merged with the collective psyche of his family. George's identity was not just shaped by his family, as all of ours are, but rather he became an avatar or expression of that psyche. George W. Bush is the Bush-Walker legacy in the form of a single human being. He is a particular manifestation that embodies the essence of this family.The Bush-Walker family is a tight clan with a strong sense of identity. They have been highly successful in both business and politics. A central value of this family is competition. They are raised to compete, and to win. They (particularly the men) are raised to succeed financially, and they are raised to win elective office. This was simply a given, and George Walker Bush had no inclination to deviate from this course. He was a Bush. His otherwise strong and outgoing personality was based upon an identity singularly lacking in individuality, but rather was, and is, a collective construct. This, in and of itself, is not problematic, but the co-existence of Saturn in the twelfth complicates the situation enormously.
Saturn in the Twelfth House
Saturn's primary function is survival - successful operation within its external environment, particularly its social environment. As the infant discovers the limits of its personal (Solar) will, it uses Saturn to develop a relationship with the power beyond these limits. This mainly means a relationship with authority, and for the child this means its parents. The psyche, through Saturn, takes in their expectations, rules, judgments, and generally the consensus reality within which they live. The child creates a mental model of reality that allows it to function effectively within the limits of the social structure. This balances the child's feeling of personal vulnerability with the security of feeling part of a stable and thus predictable external structure.When Saturn is in the twelfth house, it is difficult for the individual to establish a stable and permanent model of reality. As we have seen, the twelfth house psyche has a fluid quality. Ideas, images, perceptions emerge from the depths, take form, glow with an internal light, and then dissolve. There is a fragile, ephemeral beauty to manifestation. The individual senses the arbitrariness of form. Consensus reality is but an artifact, a creation of the human mind. But Saturn's job is to ensure survival by operating within an established and clearly structured system of goals and limits. The result of this conflict between the need for permanent structure and the intuition of its impossibility, short of delusion, creates a fundamental tension in the young twelfth house-based mind, generating deep anxiety and confusion.
The psyche must realize that its Saturnian model of reality is just that - a model. It must hold the model lightly in its hands, taking reality with a grain of salt. It must get its sense of stability and security not from the model but from its connection to the source of the model - essence. This not only allows it to operate in the twelfth house, but gives it a number of strengths that transcend Saturn's "normal" manifestation.
Most importantly, it is able to allow its model of reality to change. When the external circumstances change, this Saturn is able to allow its current model to dissolve and morph into a more accurate reflection of the new reality. This is an act of surrender, seen by Saturn not as weakness but as strength. It is thus able to adapt, to accomplish its essential goals within a changed structrure. This kind of fundamental change is always painful for Saturn. A mature, twelfth house Saturn is willing to feel this pain, to experience disappointment and disillusionment. It is willing to feel hurt without feeling victimized. It recognizes its own contribution to the pain - its attachment to the old model and resistance to the new. From this awareness of its own difficulty in letting go it develops compassion for others, as well as forgiveness.
With support and guidance from the "big people" in the child's life, primarily parents and teachers, Saturn can learn to navigate the waters of the unconscious. It develops the ability to distinguish form from essence, and it learns how to detach from form. Unfortunately George's family environment made it especially difficult for this Saturnian developmental process to take place.
First of all, the very distinction between form and essence was blurred. Apparently George's father did not state his expectations and limits explicitly.1 Instead George was required to sense or intuit them. He only knew he had failed or transgressed when his father responded to him with silent but obvious disappointment. The internalized Saturnian reality thus had, from the beginning, a vague quality that nonetheless had real consequences when misperceived.
Second, George's Saturn, like all twelfth house planets, was sensitive not just to the unspoken, but to the unfelt. In this house of the unconscious, George absorbed the attitudes and feelings of the people around him, even if, or perhaps particularly because they themselves were not aware of them. These energies were usually unconscious in the first place because they were alienated, being inconsistent with or threatening to the person's conscious judgments and beliefs. George experienced them just as strongly as, or in some cases more strongly than, the explicit and overt, and the resulting contradiction tended to generate a great deal of confusion in his twelfth house psyche.
Third, George was actively discouraged from engaging in the kind of introspection that is required for the healthy development of twelfth house planets. The twelfth archetype has a long history of alienation in the Bush family. George W.'s father, George H.W. Bush, has North Node in the twelfth, and his father, Prescott Bush, had North Node in Pisces. An archetype tends to repeat in the Saturns and North Nodes of generations of a family until someone integrates the energy. This family does not recognize the power of the unconscious, and does not value introspection. George W. absorbed this judgment; he has no use for what he very critically calls "psychobabble". He has not engaged in the internal exploration necessary to resolve the conflict between the need for permanence in an ever-changing reality.
There are two main ways that the psyche tends to respond to this unresolved conflict. First, with neither a concrete internalized reality nor a connection to essence, the individual drifts through life without clear goals. We see this in the first phase of George's life, where he went from one job to the next, never really accomplishing very much. At the same time he dulled the anxiety with alcohol, a distorted attempt to contact essence. The other possible reaction of a twelfth house Saturn is to ignore its fundamental intuition of the subtle fluidity of experience. Instead it arbitrarily imposes upon itself an external structured system of belief and behavior. While it may not be deeply rooted in the individual's experience, it serves to halt the drifting and shore up the underlying weak sense of reality. We see this in George's conversion to evangelical Christianity, as well as his strong committment to neoconservatism. In these cases Saturn used George's South Node in Sagittarius to cover and defend his confusion and vulnerability with a rigid conscious belief system. When circumstances change, however, George does not have the ability to allow this model to transform, but rather rigidly commits himself to its defense.
Saturn in Cancer in the Twelfth
George W. Bush's twelfth house Saturn is, like his Sun, in Cancer. As we saw, his Sun so merged with his family that he became his family personified. Saturn followed a similar path. His family's relationship with society was uncritically absorbed to become his own. Further, the social structure within which this family achieved so much success and status became, without conscious consideration, reality - both as it is and should be. Finally, his family's religious orientation, their relationship with the ultimate authority, the greatest whole, was also absorbed.This is a family that has been very successful operating within the traditional structures of our society. They have been successful financially and politically, but also personally and morally. The have created a strong and mutually supportive extended family. The men have been "upstanding citizens" who felt a responsibility to contribute to and serve their communities, their nation. They had, however, as a family, reached a point where a fundamental change was required. We saw the alienation of the twelfth archetype in George's father and grandfather. They needed to come to terms with essence, to move beyond their attachment to the forms within which they had achieved so much success.
This is George's responsibility. It is his job to surrender to essence, to allow his attachment to these inherited Saturnian structures to pass away. He must do this for himself, he must do this for his family, and he must do this for his country. He has not, as far as I can see, done his job.
As long as George remained within the familiar and homogeneous environment of his family and economic class, this assumed reality was constantly reinforced, counteracting the natural dissolving tendencies of the twelfth house. A major Saturnian crisis came, however, while George was pursuing his undergraduate degree at Yale. He was there, following in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather. While not the star athlete or scholar that his father was, he got by. He was a likeable fellow who excelled in the social arena.
This was not, however, his father's Yale. This was the 60's, a time of social unrest and ferment. The traditional values of respect for authority, competition and financial success were under assault. The Civil Rights movement exposed and was attempting to redress the inequities of institutionalized racism. Responding to the Vietnam War, many of the youth began to see the "establishment" as greedy and oppressive. Politicians were no longer idealized as public servants but rather increasingly seen as corrupt and power-hungry. Businessmen were viewed not as hard-working successes but rather as selfish automatons.
George did not take this well. The social structure within which his family's identity was rooted was being criticized and rejected. The consistent feedback necessary for the maintenance of his twelfth house Saturnian reality became discordant. The world was changing. Without the ability to connect to essence, this was intolerable. The attitudes and structures that his family had raised him to identify with and respect were dissolving. Drug-crazed Hippies were turning their backs on the very values that had made this country strong. This could only weaken us, and weakness is dangerous.
George, of course, did not recognize the changes going on around him as reflections of his own twelfth house conflict. He did not see this as an opportunity to find the place of connection, of essential unity between the traditional culture and the counterculture. He did not allow these external forces to catalyze the dissolving of his Saturnian reality into this essence, in preparation for the emergence of an integration of the old and the new. He could not see that his very family could play an important role in this process of transformation, and he did not realize that it was his responsibility to lead the way.
Instead, overwhelmed by unconscious fear, he reacted defensively. He projected his alienated North Node closely conjuncting Uranus in the eleventh onto the world around him, experiencing this social upheval as irresponsible anarchy. He saw the values of individual responsibility, hard work and competition that he and his family respected being replaced by an entitled victim mentality. It was as if, instead of feeling proud of his family's success and position, he should feel guilty. He didn't, at least consciously; he felt angry. And he drew upon his South Node.
South Node
George, like all of us, began early in his life to depend upon his South Node. It is our primary method of defending our Saturnian reality, maintaining its stability. It does this in the following manner. We create the Saturnian model in the first place to deal with our sense of vulnerability, to gain security through the approval of the authorities in our life. When our current experience clashes in some way with these internalized judgments and beliefs, the security is threatened. We feel a need to suppress the disturbing experience, to get away from it. We shift the locus of our attention to our South Node.The South Node is a very robust part of the psyche. It provides an experiential orientation that is familiar and effective. We are born an expert at manifesting this archetype. When our consciousness is centered here, we feel at home. It is our security blanket. We instinctively begin to develop it as small children, and from the beginning it provides a "safe" place to be, from which to approach life. We rely on it more and more; eventually it becomes a prominent if not the prominent asepct of our personality. When we feel anxious for whatever reason, including Saturnian insecurity, we automatically ensconce ourself in our South Node. The more insecure we are, the more we manifest our South Node. We are thus able to avoid feeling the anxiety and confusion, as well as any experiences that would tend to challenge the stability and hegemony of our Saturnian reality.
Beyond this primary way of stabilizing Saturn through avoidance, the South Node can also have secondary effects. The sign and house archetypes of the South Node can develop in ways that provide direct antidotes to Saturn's fears. George W. Bush has South Node in Sagittarius in the fifth house. We will see how Sagittarius counteracts one of his fears, and the fifth house counteracts another.
South Node in Sagittarius
One of the factors contributing to the instability of George's model of reality was its basis in and sensitivity to non-verbal and in some cases unconscious messages from the environment. This was all outside George's control. He needed a way to personally reinforce his model of reality, particularly when he was in an environment different from his family. His South Node in Sagittarius provides this very thing.Sagittarius is both our need and our ability to understand, to make sense of life. It constructs a belief system, a set of assumptions and concepts that explain the world and our place in it. It is fundamentally a moral sign, seeking to base all behavior upon its consistent set of beliefs. Sagittarius emphasizes the collective, thinking in terms of groups rather than individuals. Morality, therefore, is that which supports the welfare of the group.
This Sagittarian way of thinking provided George with a conscious, mental and verbal structure or container to superimpose upon his vaguer, more feeling-based Saturnian reality. George is not the intellectual type, and leaned toward simple statements of principle that for him did not require elaboration. For example, at Yale in the face of the Anti-War movement, it was something like "It's everyone's duty to serve their country". As he aged, he required a more comprehensive belief system. He found this in a combination of evangelical Christianity and neoconservatism.
These belief systems provide George with ideas that focus and anchor his Cancerian feelings. They give him clarity and direction. Any situation that emerges, both in his personal and political life, can be judged in relation to their basic principles, and a course of action can easily be determined. This is how Sagittarius functions in every psyche.
There is a problem here, however. This South Node, like most, is being used to avoid Saturnian fears and thus to prevent the Saturnian model of reality from transforming. This introduces a bias. Instead of being used to understand life, George uses his Sagittarius to rationalize and justify an inherited reality. Instead of an open-ended exploration for meaning, his interest is to preserve and defend established values and beliefs in the face of constant change. As a result, the South Node is stressed and over-expressed, its manifestation becoming extreme and distorted. At the same time the North Node is alienated - prevented from manifesting as a conscious part of George's identity. The balancing influence of Gemini is removed, leading to an even greater distortion of the South Node.
Sagittarius becomes ideologically rigid and intolerant. Any argument that preserves the traditional, inherited Saturnian reality is embraced, no matter how extreme. Any position that challenges Saturn is perceived as dangerous - to George and his allies, and ultimately to America. Without the balancing influence of new experiences and perspectives brought to it by its opposite but alienated sign Gemini, Sagittarius becomes more extreme, more rigid, and more aggressive. It becomes convinced that it is absolutely right, and anyone that believes differently is just plain wrong.
Here are a few political issues and values conflicts facing Americans today. I have taken the liberty of stating what I think are George's obvious positions on the matters, and invite you to judge for yourself where his positions lie on the following continuum. At one end we have a flexible attitude that considers and respects the thinking and values of opponents, and thus gives ample room for compromise. At the other end we have a rigid attitude that is sure it is right and feels that compromise is dangerous and morally wrong. In archetypal terms, this continuum spans from a balance of Gemini and Sagittarius to extreme and distorted Sagittarius.
| Good/True | Bad/False | Flexibility of Position |
|---|---|---|
| Cutting Taxes | Raising Taxes | ? |
| Capitalism | Socialism | ? |
| Self-sufficiency, competition, ownership society | Government-run Social Welfare Programs | ? |
| Banning Abortion | Women's Right to Choose | ? |
| Banning creation of new embryonic stem cells | Supporting stem cell research | ? |
| Sexual Abstinence | Condoms | ? |
| Unitary Executive | Checks and Balances | ? |
| Western-style Democracy | Other Social Structures | ? |
| Islamic radicals hate our way of life | Islamic radicals hate our foreign policy | ? |
| War in Iraq is Fighting Terrorism | War in Iraq is a mistake | ? |
| Fighting | Surrender | ? |
| America | Any Nation That Opposes our Will | ? |
We could obviously continue this for quite awhile. The point here is that, in my opinion, George Bush presents his beliefs and political positions as absolutely correct and morally unassailable. Anyone who disagrees with him is either woefully uniformed or a danger to the American way of life. This is not firmness of character or laudable moral rectitude. This is rigidity of thought that cannot, that will not consider any point of view outside its narrow beliefs. This is defensive Sagittarius, with Gemini's flexibility of thought completely alienated. Further, as a Fire sign, this distorted manifestation of Sagittarius goes on the offensive, attempting to impose its beliefs and moral standards upon others. Choice is not relevant, only moral correctness.
South Node in the Fifth House
George W. Bush's South Node is in the fifth house (with his North Node in the 11th). This archetypal emphasis is strongly reinforced by his Leo Ascendant with Mercury and Pluto rising in Leo. This is the archetype of the personal will. We saw, however, that with his Sun in the twelfth house, the source of George's personal will, is weakened. Its tendency to be unconsciously influenced by and merge with the psyches around him makes him more of an expression of a collective will. Though we wonder if maybe Dick Cheney is the power behind the throne, on the surface George's fifth house/Leo swagger commands attention and exudes confidence.The real issue, as we have seen repeatedly, is his Saturn in the twelfth house. Without constant defense and reinforcement, its natural tendency to dissolve into essence would prevail. This, as we have also seen, is George's greatest fear. The urge to give up, to surrender - this is nothing but weakness. It must be resisted and covered up at all costs. This is a mistake. The true context or greater whole of a twelfth house Saturn transcends family, society, indeed physical reality. Saturn's job here is to establish a relationship between the individual psyche and (fill in the blank - Essence, the Universe, God, Spirit ...). This can only be done by detaching from any and all form. In practice this means a continual letting go, a surrendering of attachment to all structures masquerading in the psyche as this ultimate whole.
Except in his heart of hearts, George doesn't know this. He holds onto his Sagittarian concepts of family, country and God as if they are the essence they point towards. And he uses his not inconsiderable fifth house/Leonian will to oppose, once again at all costs, his deeper urge to surrender. Whenever he feels tired, weak, wanting to give up, to surrender, Saturn sends energy and consciousness to South Node. This is an act of identification - he tells himself that he must be strong and aggressive, that weakness is dangerous. He must fight against this character flaw, this shameful secret. And in doing this, in asserting his Solar will through Saturn in opposition to everything that his mind associates with surrender, he is proving to himself that he is strong, a man.
He is not just a man, he is the President. He is the administrator of a nation. He truly is the Decider. He has created an administration that is the national manifestation of his Saturnian reality. We are living in his reality. He feels a responsibility to the nation to be strong, to oppose the forces that would attempt to change his inherited reality. Whether they are Islamofascist terrorists, liberal Democrats, apologists of the counterculture or murderers of viable embryos in the creation of stem cells, they are the enemy. It truly is a culture war, and this President is not about to surrender, is not going to give an inch, there is no possibility for compromise. We are right and they are wrong, and that is that.
Therefore, he feels, he must assert his will. The fifth house is a house of will, Leo is the sign of will. He attempts to impose his will on everything and everyone around him. If he can do it by charming them, by making them laugh, by making them feel special with a personal nickname, that's preferable. If this doesn't work, as with political opponents or anyone he has put into the enemy category, he will use any power at his disposal to force people to bend to his will. Even the rule of law takes a back seat to the will of the man in charge.
This is an important difference between him and Nixon. Nixon was certainly as willful - his Sun was in the fifth house. But that Sun was in Capricorn, as was his Mercury and Jupiter. He fundamentally identified with the law. He certainly played fast and loose with the rules, but when it came right down to it, he surrendered. Rather than harm himself and the country any further, he put the rule of law above his role. George does not identify with the law. The rules he learned as a child were feelings, not words, and certainly not words written down on paper. What he identifies with is will.
George uses this will, in conjunction with his rigid Sagittarian mind, to suppress any ideas contrary to his ideology. The alienated 11th house is the house of objectivity, of detached and impersonal truth. As we have seen, he has attempted to silence any member of his administration whose opinions stray even slightly from that of the White House. In particular scientists, from NASA to the Surgeon General, have been pressured to twist or suppress scientific findings that don't fit the ideology.
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My purposes in writing this article are manifold. First, I wanted to demonstrate the use of the model of evaluating a politician's emphasis of their South Node in defense of their Saturnian reality to determine how adaptable they are likely to be in changing circumstances. Second, I wanted to use George W. Bush as a case study because his leadership of the United States has had such a profound effect on our country and the world. Understanding his unconscious motivations and the functioning of his psyche may help us to judge the validity of his policies. Now I want to take us a step further. I want to look the national consequences of George's attempt to defend his Saturn, and the role we can play in completing a necessary process of transformation.I suggested at the beginning of this essay that, because of his twelfth house Sun in Cancer, George W. Bush's personal identity merged with that of his family, effectively becoming an individualized expression or manifestation of that family. Through his twelfth house Saturn in Cancer, he uncritically absorbed his family's expectations, judgments, indeed their social reality. However, also because of its twelfth house location, George's responsibility, both to himself and his family, is to allow this structure to dissolve, releasing its essence back into the collective unconscious. Well, it turns out that George's responsibility was to more than his family, that his identity was a manifestation of more that just his family. It looks like George is an avatar of his whole nation.
Let us recall that the United States has its Sun in Cancer, along with three other planets. George merged with more than just his family, but rather with a very strong current of attitudes and values that has a long tradition in the American psyche. His Saturn in the twelfth house respresents the need for this collective reality to re-connect to its source.
Saturn's primary responsibility, as we have seen, is survival. It values strength, and it identifies with structure. These structures protect it from danger, provide it with security. The twelfth house is therefore a very challenging place for it, as all structures dissolve in the twelfth. It fears this dissolving, experiencing it as a weakening. And so it tends to resist, to defend the structures. As we have seen, this is the path George Bush chose. Using the not inconsiderable power of his South Node in the 5th in Sagittarius, along with Pluto in Leo rising and other archetypal resources, he went on the offensive against all that would weaken our collective commitment to the social values embraced by his family, values centered on economic competitiveness. First by supporting his father's political campaigns, and later by attaining public office himself, George W. Bush made it his job to protect his inherited social reality.
It is apparent to me that this country has been in a long process of transforming its Cancerian identity. I would suggest that this began in earnest while Pluto was in Cancer (1912-1939), when the Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt established a new relationship between the government and people. There are many who thought this was the wrong direction to take, and the family of George W. Bush was central among them. George absorbed this orientation through his Saturn, and during his administration has attempted to further (begun during the Reagan years) dismantle this usurping structure and return us to a full commitment to the free market. From tax cuts to stimulate investment to the aborted attempt to privatize Social Security, we have seen one version of the twelfth house dissolving of a Saturnian social structure in an attempt to return to an envisioned ideal.
And then there was 9/11. Structures that were at the heart of our economic and military strength were attacked. We watched in awe and terror as the Twin Towers collapsed, literally dissolving to dust. People, just like us, just doing their jobs, died. It was a moment of truth, an opportunity for him and for us to deal with vulnerability. Instead we freaked out, and apparently so did George, if the clip of his staring into space in front of the class of children after getting the news of the attack is any evidence. But he quickly pulled it together. While this was an external manifestation of his greatest fear, he had a lifetime of experience in defending against it.
We gave him the power to protect us, to do what a Cancer instinctively knows how to do. Defend the American way of life. George took the power, and he ran with it. Further than many people expected? Yes, but our collective John Wayne, "vulnerability invites attack" mentality is essentially no different from the fears of a twelfth house Saturn. We joined our collective karma with George's, or perhaps he was always our avatar. But a twelfth house Saturn, no matter how vigorously defended, always falls in the end. It is simply a case of how much suffering must be endured before vulnerability is discovered as an essential strength.
We are a much weaker country today than we were on 9/11. Our military is stretched almost to the breaking point. The deficit has skyrocketed and the dollar has plumeted, opening us to the increasing influence of foreign investors - from Saudi Arabia to China. Between weak regulation of mortgage lenders to total opposition to any governmental involvement in health insurance, the middle class - the primary guarantor of economic and social stability in a democracy (even according to the neoconservatives) - increasingly finds itself one family illness away from homelessness. Partisan political intransigence, as well as the valuing of personal loyalty over competence, have reduced the public's respect for authority to historic lows. Government-sponsored torture has weakened our moral standards and national pride; extra-legal surveillance and incarceration have weakened our national identification with the law.
Perhaps George does not see these trends as the signs of national weakness that I do. But does he see that he has led the Republican Party to its weakest position since after Watergate and Nixon's resignation? The Party most commited to his inherited Saturnian values is in danger of losing its influence for a generation. Does anyone continue to believe that Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility? And when will its greatest trump card - "strong on defense" - cease to be associated with arrogant overreaching and failure in Iraq?
George W. Bush has been a central character in the reaction against all that would weaken our country. In the process he has, I would suggest, created the very relationship between government and the people that he set out to destroy. His Cancerian Saturn has manifested as an all-powerful parent protecting us, but in the process consuming vast amounts of our collective resources and turning us into dependent children. Our increasing national weakness can only be reversed by acknowledging and dealing with the essential vulnerability of life. Homeland Security is dependent not on electronic surveillance and military force, but rather in returning to the true essence of Cancer in taking care of one another and expanding our definition of family to include the entire human race.