One of the fondest memories I have of growing up in suburban Detroit in the late ’60s and early ’70s was going over to my maternal grandmother’s house where I would listen to two albums and eat Nutter Butters.
One album replayed the Pittsburgh Pirates’s Bill Mazeroski hitting a dramatic home run in the 1960 World Series to beat the New York Yankees. It is one of the greatest events in baseball history.
The other album that took up my time on afternoons at Marn’s house, was the Fifth Dimension’s The Age of Aquarius. You remember that one, don’t you? 1967. The opening song to the musical Hair….NOT an unimportant moment in American cultural history. Here we go…feel free to sing along….
When the Moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then Peace will guide the Planets
And Love will steer the Stars
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Age Aquarius. Aquarius! Aquarius!
(See, this one comes back quickly…second verse now….here we go…)
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation
Aquarius! Aquarius!
One of the great songs of the Cultural Revolution, right? So, go ahead and read those lyrics again. Powerful stuff, right?
Nope.
“Astrological gibberish” says writer and astrologer Neil Spencer. Apparently Jupiter aligns with Mars twice a year and the Moon is in the Seventh House for two hours every day. The Age of Aquarius is “astrological gibberish”?
Considering that the Occupy Wall Street protests are also grounded in gibberish since there are no lists of demands being forwarded or any solutions for so-called “corporate greed”, one is left wondering what is all this fuss about?
Is it the nihilistic left trying to find its voice since it feels betrayed by the Obama Administration for not going far enough to the left? A thought that leaves the other 85% of Americans in stunned silence. Is it that they really want jobs even though they protest capitalism? A clear study in the duality of man. Is it both? Who knows? There is no clear message other than the fact that they are upset that the Socialist Utopia is unlikely to happen given the American reflexive response to its acceleration during this time of economic upheaval.
Rahm Emanuel saw the this crisis as an opportunity; however, the majority of Americans are in the process of unconsciously deciding just which Revolution they prefer – American or French. Americans are choosing the American Revolution because it’s a part of our cultural DNA.
The French Revolution, a genocide on the scale of Cambodia in the ’70s, was a populist uprising against a corrupt Church that was all too close to a corrupt Monarchy, the Ancien Regime. Together they formed a corrupt plutocracy which was overthrown by poor and hungry people. Not simply replaced in an orderly fashion, not simply a reform of the Church and Monarchy, this was a violent revolution. This changed Europe forever and culminated in two World Wars over the struggle between freedom and totalitarian regimes.
Fast forward and you find the rise of the Church of Man. The French, in just five years of revolution, reduced the number of Catholic parishes offering Mass from 40,000 to 150. What filled that void in the ordering of society? Man’s ideas – some brilliant and some horrible.
Conversely, America is a nation founded on Christian principles, economic and personal freedoms and so was its Revolution. Today, many more Americans identify with the TEA Party and not the Occupy Wall Street protesters. There are some links between the two and both sets of protesters should not be dismissed by their foes. The protesters on the Right and Left rightly see the problems of corrupted government, foreign wars, escalating debt and a growing chasm between rich and poor. The main reason the Occupy Wall Street protests will gather some, but not much more, steam is that the people of America, unlike the French, are not hungry and not secular humanists.
We are, for the most part, concerned. These are, after all, times of great concern. But our poor are obese. They are poorly nourished but not starving in the streets. They have cable and air conditioning and can buy a couple of Mountain Dews and a Slim Jim with a swipe of a food stamp card at your local 7-11.
The protesters on the Left, for the most part, out of touch with the reality of America. They are rightly concerned about our own American plutocratic tendencies, but they are missing the broader points of what feeds that beast, namely the taxpayer.
The more government grows in complexity and scope, the more larger companies gain because they can keep up with/manipulate the changes to our legal and tax codes.
Sadly, the protesters miss what the Founders got correct – our rights come from God, not each other.
Still I am grateful to live in a country that allows its people peacefully redress their grievances. It gives me the chance to see Hollywood nitwits like Susan Sarandon drone on how the protesters were simply joining their Arab brothers and sisters in solidarity. Sarandon told a reporter that she was there to be “educated” on what was happening and that she would return after her trip to Italy.
Can’t make this stuff up. A Hollywood star thinks women were protesting in the streets of Cairo and that she was in solidarity with them. Apparently, she was not wearing a burqa when she boarded the plane nor was she aware that women were not out protesting during the Arab Spring. Zut Alors!
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo’s epic novel set in the French Revolution, ends differently and there is no Age of Aquarius/Let The Sun Shine In “astrological gibberish”, just a dying man happy with the love of his daughter and son in law.
American Conservatives often fight for the free exercise of religion and lament the “wall of separation of Church and State” that Thomas Jefferson built in his letter to Danbury Baptists. The Right might rethink that position and thank Jefferson for saving the Church from “astrological gibberish” and Man so moved by it. Thus saving freedom at the source.
Cold Fusion column by Chris Saxman
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