Midlife Transits

It’s eclipse season. The news out of Haiti is sobering, disturbing, sad and tragic. But on the homefront, it has caused nothing but absurdity in the sudden soap opera “As The NBC Late Night Schedule Turns.” You need a scorecard to keep track of all the players, so here goes.

Conan O’Brien: Aries. The current eclipse series affects his solar career/home life axis. The one on January 15 is the career one. Boy, did he get knocked upside the head by that one (they can affect a person early).

Not only did he get the news from NBC in a hurry, he was supposed to make a decision in a hurry. That’s what eclipses often do; they make you jump through their hoops before you have a chance to tie your shoes. This is a solar eclipse, intended to signify a new beginning. The last eclipse in Capricorn in this series takes place in early 2011, so the universe has another year to mess with his career.

But it looks like he comes out all right, maybe even better than all right. Pluto’s on his side, trining his Ascendant. Of course, it is also squaring his natal Jupiter, indicating that none of this is easy for him. He probably feels (as do many others) that he totally got screwed by NBC.

Uranus is jumping up and down on his natal Venus in the 7th house, giving him a sudden and perhaps unexpected jolt of support from many members of the public. Neptune will assist him later this year, and Uranus will make an opportunity angle with his Midheaven (career point). In the end, he’ll come into his own. He probably will not appreciate the process of coming into his own, as it looks a bit rough, but ultimately, he should land in a spot that actually suits him better than The Tonight Show. Hopefully at least.

Carson Daly: Cancer. Poor Carson Daly. He went from being a nobody on the late night talk show scene (airing after Jimmy Fallon) to being mocked for being a nobody on the late night scene. The eclipses affect his Ascendant/Descendant line, wreaking goodness knows what effects on his life. But even worse, he’s got a cardinal Grand Cross going as Pluto makes a mean angle to his sun, his natal Pluto, and his natal Mars all at the same time. Pluto’s passed the one degree mark where so many of his planets fall, but it probably won’t stop bedeviling him until the next round of eclipses this summer. He’s not out of the woods then, either. Once Pluto stops pounding him, Uranus will. If he’s lucky, at least they’ll stop making jokes about him.

Craig Ferguson: Taurus. Eclipses fall in his solar 3rd and 9th houses, typically not a very exciting place for them to occur. If you’re a fan of Craig Ferguson (on after David Letterman) as I am, you could at least hope all this nonsense would end up being good news for Craig, but alas the stars do not support him. Neptune’s busy squaring his sun and opposing his natal Uranus. He has started beating Jimmy Fallon in the ratings recently I hear. In the interests of promoting Craig and piling on NBC, I hope that continues. But Craig’ll probably have to wait for really big progress.

David Letterman: Aries. Eclipses affect his career and home life, as they do Conan. Dave’s already had some jolts, and he’s having a ball with this latest round of foolishness at a rival network. He may get a lucky break (ratings boost) out of all the hoo-hah, but he’ll have his hands full with his own concerns most likely. For one thing, in addition to eclipses, he’ll have Uranus on his Mars this summer. That’s an explosive combination.

Jay Leno: Taurus. The man being blamed for all this mess, perhaps unfairly. Eclipses in his 3rd and 9th houses, generally not too powerful, although they’ll apparently have him moving time slots. Jay’s probably as confused by the whole debacle as anyone else. Neptune’s been squaring his Mercury for quite some time, and that’s about as confusing as things can get. The move to 10 p.m. was a nightmare from a chart standpoint (Pluto square Uranus plus Uranus on Mars), but he comes out both lucky and powerful with Pluto supporting his Jupiter. His less than edgy personality and style probably have something to do with that.

Jeff Zucker: Aries. The NBC executive who dreamed up this crazy dance, perhaps the man most realistically to blame for the whole fiasco. Eclipses affect his career/home life. For some time, there have been a fair number of creative types in Hollywoodland who’ve wished that Mr. Zucker didn’t have a career any longer since he seems to specialize in hacking off creative types. I don’t have his birth time, so I don’t know if any of the angles of his chart are affected. At the moment, however, it all seems to be up in the air chart-wise as Neptune and Uranus are scheduled to weigh in with contradictory advice. My guess for the moment is that whatever ends up happening won’t go as planned from Zucker’s standpoint.

Jimmy Fallon: Virgo. Eclipses affect his 5th and 11th houses. The 11th house does relate to one’s long-held dreams. Mr. Fallon got a big break when Leno was pushed into prime time, but his chart’s in a pretty bad mood now. Pluto’s soon to square his Mars, not a happy thought, just as Uranus opposes his Virgo sun. He’s got a little help from Neptune, but his chart is seething. I don’t have his time o’birth, so I can’t guess how he’ll react outwardly, but his chart is stressed out.

Jimmy Kimmel:Scorpio. Eclipses affect his 3rd and 9th houses, not too energetic a place to host them. It can’t make ABC’s late night star too happy to hear people speculating that Conan could go to ABC. And Kimmel’s chart has been in the throes of mid-life transits. They seem to be affecting his personal and romantic life (e.g., with his ex, Sarah Silverman) more than his career though. Although he’s gotten some good jokes out of the mess, that’s probably all that will happen on the career front. Probably.

Strangely, many of these late night players share all kinds of resonances between their charts. Aries, Taurus, and Pisces are all quite prominent. The 11 degree mark seems to show up over and over again as well as Venus in Pisces. It never occurred to me that there might be chart signatures for late night hosts. Who knew?

P.S. If you can donate even a small sum by text message for the victims of the Haitian earthquake, you would be doing so much good. Earthquakes are perhaps the most devastating natural disasters, and one cannot help but feel for those brave souls trying desperately to dig out their loved ones without equipment and to cope with the aftermath of such a cataclysm.

Who knew there was a word for the mixture of “anxiety and unrealistic optimism”? According to an article in USA Today it’s called ‘hypomania’ and the current generation suffers from it. According to the article, the young people suffering through the Great Depression may have had it rough, but at least they had their mental health. Today’s high school and college students, on the other hand, are supposedly 5 or 6 times more likely to suffer from some sort of an anxiety or depression disorder. And a quarter of those surveyed had what might be called an attitude disorder–they didn’t think ‘the rules’ applied to them.

There are probably all kinds of reasons for the results found by the study cited in the article, including, perhaps, today’s young people being more willing to be honest about how they feel. I’ll focus on the astrological reasons only.

In 1969, a man named Nathaniel Braden published a book called The Psychology of Self-Esteem and started the self-esteem movement. (It wasn’t a very good book, by the way. My mother got it for me and I was not impressed.) The timing of Braden’s book wasn’t a coincidence astrologically.

In 1970, shortly after the book was published, the skies ushered in the Long Era of Sagittarius, patron sign of unrealistic optimism. From 1970 to 2008, with a short break in the 1990s, one of the big outer planets (Pluto, Neptune or Uranus) was in Sagittarius. These planets glommed right on to the notion of self-esteem because it fit their Sagittarian bias toward believing that failure either doesn’t exist or is irrelevant. So for 40 years almost, American children (perhaps children worldwide, the phenomenon was not limited to the US) were fed on a steady diet of self-esteem and unrealistic optimism. No wonder they’re anxious.

Unrealistic optimism is a recipe for anxiety as it is, by its nature, unrealistic. Much like the financial system was, children were taught to balance themselves on a house of self-esteem cards they knew could not stand forever. Another study, summarized in this article, explains why unrealistic self-esteem is so anxiety-provoking. The Pluto in Leo parents of these children fed the phenomenon because the sign of Leo places a great premium on confidence, assertiveness and even, one could argue, on a sense of entitlement.

After 40 years of almost non-stop Sagittarius influence on our culture, we were probably all a bit hypomaniac by 2007 (when the hypomaniac students were surveyed). We’d have been weird if we weren’t. We may have subconsciously known that the Pluto in Capricorn era was coming, that the center wouldn’t hold, that we had to get our piece of the pie before the pie disappeared.

The pie has disappeared now or at least gotten a lot smaller. A new sign is the Big Man on Campus for the moment, Capricorn. Capricorn loves to think about failure and is suspicious of success. I read an article in Vanity Fair this summer about an elite girls school, and the new headmistress summed up the new regime. She takes the attitude that we’re all a bunch of softies, afraid to hurt each other’s feelings.

Her name is Kate Windsor and she says “This idea of a structure of hierarchy or power has been really dismissed as being not part of the American way or the American Dream. We can all do, we can all be, and we’re all successful.” Ms. Windsor dislikes the idea that we can all be successful. She is in favor of formality, matter-of-factness, losers as well as winners, traditions, and purposely making people anxious so they can learn to be tough.

She could be the PR spokesflack for Pluto in Capricorn. Capricorn is hierarchy and Pluto is power. Ergo, Pluto in Cap is all over the concept of a hierarchy of power. It loves formality, unsentimentality, tradition, fear, and toughness. Given that the hypomania-inducing concept of self-esteem has been apparently scientifically discredited now, Ms. Windsor’s view will probably become increasingly widespread.

So I suppose we should all learn that the self-esteem idea was idiotic and that the people who bought into it were equally stupid? I’m not so sure.

The idea was of the times. The Great Depression was long gone. Things were, in many respects, undeniably economically and socially better than they had been a few short decades ago. It would have been foolish to retain the Depression-era stoicism in an era of abundance. People needed to adapt to a new reality.

It was only natural to attempt to articulate a psychology of feeling good in a set of circumstances in which there was every reason to feel good. How foolish would it have been to force an ethic of ‘don’t enjoy anything and don’t be optimistic’ when there was lots to enjoy and seemingly good reason for optimism?

The self-esteem idea and the hypomania that accompanied worked for quite awhile and then it didn’t. The Ms. Windsors of the world with their Capricornian attitudes will work for awhile and then they won’t. Times change and so do our maladies. I’m not entirely sure the Sagittarian generations didn’t get a good deal out of the bargain–hypomania may be a more pleasant malady than a grindingly depressing world in which there are far more losers and far fewer winners.