Kendall Jenner, yet another member of the Jenner-Kardashian hairball coughed up from America’s celebrity-obsessed subconscious, recently appeared in a two and a half minute long Pepsi ad posted on YouTube. This, in and of itself, is not big news. The reason this ad is getting so much attention is… well, heck, don’t take my word for it, just watch the thing (unless you’re currently ill, emotionally fragile, or pregnant):
Yes, you saw that right. The massive frustration with the way America is turning out that is being expressed by protests and anger and resistance has been turned into a marketing angle. It’s as if aliens watched a few months worth of our news, tried to communicate to us that they were about to destroy us for our own stupidity, and decided the best way to get that message through was via a soft drink commercial.
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I could express plenty of outrage at this (buy me a couple of drinks and I will!), but that’s already happening on othermany places on the Internet. As this is an astrology blog, I looked up Kendall Jenner’s birth chart (November 3rd 1995, 3:38 PM, Los Angeles California) hoping to see some profoundly bad transits I could rant about.
Meh. No big deal happening here, one way or another.
I admit I was puzzled by this at first, but after a little thought it all made sense. The Kardashians are essentially self-perpetuating publicity machines, and anything short of a video of one of them beating a kitten to death with one of Kanye‘s hideous $200 sneakers will only feed them and make them stronger, like when Godzilla kicks over a nuclear reactor.
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Before I gave up on the subject, I decided to have a look at the chart for Pepsico (current iteration “born” December 4, 1986, 9:30 AM, New York New York). And sure enough, there they were: the kind of transit you might expect to see for a major publicity screw-up. Specifically: a Neptune transit.
Neptune is approaching the exact conjunction with Pepsi’s natal Jupiter. Sometimes this transit can result in a a strange, almost Hand Of God type of good fortune. But even when it’s in the form of a good transit, Neptune’s influence comes out in ways the rational mind didn’t expect. In Pepsi’s case, Jupiter is the ruler of its Twelfth House. The Twelfth House is, in many ways, the things that go bump in the night in your subconscious. It can be the storehouse for all the actions and motivations you perform while on mental autopilot.
Jupiter is also the ruler of the Sun, Saturn, and Uranus in Pepsi’s birth chart. If this were the chart of an individual human being, you might expect this to be the time when his or her drinking habits or unconscious assumptions leap out and bite someone on the butt.
What does that translate into, in corporate terms? In this case, it means that a huge corporation with dozens if not hundreds of market researchers, creative talents, and advertising specialists all somehow came together to produce an ad that it patently offensive to the sensibilities of millions, and it seems that no one was either brave enough to say something, or smart enough to spot the obvious. Surely, this will result in some serious economic pain for Pepsi… won’t it?
Well frankly, probably not, and for two very good reasons. First off, transiting Uranus is now trine Pepsico’s natal Uranus — which is often a time when your own freaky individuality (and yes, even your mistakes) can pay off. Add to this the fact that Uranus is the ruler of Pepsi’s Second House (which rules money) and it seems that in the long run, the company is going to keep making money nicely, thank you very much. Sure, transiting Pluto is approaching the conjunction to the company’s Moon, but that won’t be exact until 2019.
That, and of course, we live in The Age Of Neptune, when everything is just a little more fake and/or undisciplined than usual. There is outrage over this now, but it won’t take long until Twitter moves on to heckling something or someone else. Maybe it’s because our attention spans have become shorter, or maybe it’s because we have so much entertainment and distraction to feed ourselves now that there’s no point in lingering over one item on the Outrage Buffet Of Modern Life for too long.
Gosh, I wonder if anything happened in Syria recently that deserves more of our attention.
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