America In Transition

Thinking unclouded by ideology

To use Mercury with integrity is to attend to self-informing with as much clear-mindedness as we can muster. The planet’s job is to accumulate facts and figures, and connect the dots between them. Mercury is not about platforms and passions. As planets go, this one is altogether dry and neutral (11): Mercury does not concern itself with conviction, faith, or even belief (these belong to Jupiter). It just wants to find out what’s going on.

This essential meaning of Mercury diverges more and more from the way its energies are tossed around in today’s culture wars. (12) It is not that impassioned dramatizing has no role to play in successful public discourse. It is just that where Mercury is concerned, the question is not whether or not one is capable of crowd-stirring rhetoric, but whether or not one is informed. Most of the arguments now identified as clashes between “Blue State” vs. “Red State” beliefs are not differing interpretations of facts, as they purport to be, but riffs between competing ideologies; where the speaker is judged not so much by whether they’ve done their homework but by what “side” they appear to be on. The emphasis is on choosing one’s colors, like a gang member buying a red or a blue handkerchief and then wearing it with panache or not.

True Mercurial creativity cannot exist in this skewed set-up. An uninformed citizenry is a profound problem, but confusing every issue as a “rightwing” vs. “leftwing” matter muddles the issue still further.

Naiveté posing as innocence

To call the tragic young Americans being killed in Iraq “heroes” for “protecting their country” in a war that has nothing to do with wreaking vengeance upon the WTC hijackers, for instance, is a case of naiveté posing as innocence. The idea that only “liberals” believe the war in Iraq to have been based on lies is no longer worth the energy it would take to discuss it. Many such views, seen for years as the exclusive province of “Bush-haters”, in truth represent simple access to information. What we have here is not really a political problem. It is a Mercurial problem.

There is a difference between facts and opinions, a difference that those who honor Mercury must not be shy about asserting. As our educators grow increasingly alarmed and international observers look on incredulously, America’s ignorance about world history, even very recent history, is becoming not just a cultural embarrassment but a fatal flaw, as the geopolitical stakes grow higher and higher.