Thursday, April 20 | From Nepal to Washington WATCHING tensions rise in Katmandu in what may be the last days of King Gyanendra, I can see how George Bush could be pretty nervous. The Nepalese capital is now under a 24-hour curfew as people are demanding an end to the king's absolute rule. The king is attempting to suppress a massive demonstration today, using police and the military -- and it's not working so well. A massive crowd has gathered outside the city and is trying to get in. There are always more regular people than cops and soldiers. Shooting to kill is essentially an intimidation tactic, since they can't exactly kill everyone. Kings know that when people want their freedom, they want their freedom. Many feel that the choice between liberty or death is worth it. And it is clear that when people start to find their voice, the process builds exponentially, which is why you want to nip it in the bud. If Dick Cheney could ban bicycles, I am sure he would. It's an old idea, but you never know, it could catch on again and give people the notion they may be able to live without oil. Now, the only way you can have people calling for the end to absolute rule is if you have taken that for yourself, and if people have figured it out. When you're the king and you dissolve parliament, that is a clue. When you're the "President of the United States" who stole two elections (yes, two) and somebody called a lobbyist turns Congress into a pay-as-you-go policy mill, basically voting on the basis of a little extra side-cash and approving everything you do, with the big speeches the occasional opposition blowhorn makes meaning next to nothing, it's not so obvious. It can look like business as usual. To us, that is. People in power know what they're doing. That is not intended as a compliment. I mean that they know how the power is distributed (because they distributed it), and they know that people may figure it out (because they have figured it out themselves), and it makes them nervous when they vaguely sense that their ruse is failing. I say this all by way of a psychological assessment, ever-essential in sizing up the real political score. The scariest thing to a person in a high position of power is what they fear that people know. This is why even vaguely accurate newspaper articles that nobody reads make a difference. This is why if you're running a student protest, you can print just 10 copies of an informational leaflet and make sure one gets up to the president's office. Usually you print more, and perhaps students will read it with some interest -- but the administration will study it with a magnifying glass, looking for the implications. If we look at the astrology this way, we see a lot of implications. Yesterday's chart for the resignation of Scott McLellan, the White House press secretary, is a pretty big one. On one side, it looks like a nuclear bomb has gone off and on the other side it looks like a total loss of faith within the leadership structure. Several key conspirators are out of the game, or in the case of the almighty Karl Rove (who has so far survived the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation), demoted and moved near the door. And what you see on the outside barely tells the story. It's like watching silhouettes on the shade. Yet the shape of the shadows reveals something about the shape of what's hidden.