I did not want to read this book. What kind of summer reading is a 470 page history of the FBI? However, since it was a selection of my book club, one that we picked especially because it is so long making it a good August book. We don’t meet in August so it would give us the necessary time to plow through it. To my delight, the book is so well written that reading was a pleasure!
What really struck me most about the book was just how much work Pluto has to dig out the secrets and detritus of our history. Remember, Pluto’s work is to bring secrets to the forefront so that the “sins’ can be aired and remedied. Pluto is now in Capricorn, bringing up the “junk” of large authoritarian operations.
Spying on citizens whose only “crime” was supporting a Communist leaning group or being linked to the civil rights movement with Communists and subversives were just some of the “sins” of the early FBI under J Edgar Hoover. Thousands of lives were damaged by his need to root out homosexuals and other “deviants” from the government. The Rule of Law was just a suggestion.
Times are bad now, no doubt. We have rarely had a President so willing to subvert American ideals. However, he is there for a reason, he is here for Pluto to allow us to remember who we should be – who we were which wasn’t always the “good guys” and what we should be striving for in the future.
This book reminds us that this time is not the only time when we lost our way and we should work to make our “sins” of the past unrepeatable. Or we are doomed to succumb to them.