A Call for Discussions in the Chorus About the Present Danger

Dear Chorus Members,

We should like to respectfully suggest that the Chorus initiate discussions amongst ourselves, telling each other what we might do to effect positive political change this year. Why? Because obviously our lives, our children’s lives, our grandchildren’s lives will be affected by what we do and what we don’t do. Being mindful that the disarray which we see is not pure happenstance or aberration, but rather has been proceeding for decades as part of our society – call them our “autocratic oligarchs” for the sake of argument, and for parallelism with the Putin variety – has subverted what little remains of our democracy in a multitude of ways (from gerrymandering to Citizen’s United, etc.) while we have been too little involved in the civic sphere. No hidden conspiracy there -- except for the stated motivations -- but an open and largely successful effort: (Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America; Trumpocracy:The Corruption of the American Republic, by a Republican author;  It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America; The Shock Doctrine; and, No is Not Enough, etc.). And another, The Twilight of American Sanity, A Psychiatrist Analyzes The Age Of Trump, that tells us that it is not T that has been delusional -- witness that he has been successful in diminishing what is left of our democracy -- rather it is we who have been delusional in allowing him to accomplish this.

        There are things that we can do – contra Tillerson, with his There’s nothing we can do to prevent Putin’s ongoing cyber-attacks, and Who needs sanctions?  There are things that Chorus members are doing, ways that we can discuss and learn from each other. We are told that we are a brainy group that can delve to the musical meaning of what we sing. Let’s hope that that’s not all we can do. 

But why? The Chorus is a singing group not a political entity. We can act on our own in other organizations, etc. 

A simple answer is: In a time of extreme danger, why not? Other singing groups do and have been influential.

Another answer harkens back to our beginnings, we were not just a singing group. Yes, we loved to sing wonderful Russian music and to participate in Russian culture, but we were also educating ourselves with respect to the political issues of the times, about the tensions between our society and the Soviets. 

George Litton, president of the Russian Club and Chorus member, brought us people to learn from, like Kerensky, a former leader of the revolutionary provisional government before the Bolsheviks took over. William Sloane Coffin told us about his actions as a U.S. army officer liaising with Russian troops in WWII and sang Russian folk songs with us. Later, of course, Coffin became a leader in the anti Vietnam War movement. Sam Bowles, a Chorus member, invited us to North Haven Island in Maine for his wedding before he left for a Democratic National Convention, and to meet and talk with his father, Ambassador Chester Bowles. 

         We were educating ourselves about the Soviet system and our own.

And then we went to the Soviet Union. Our motivations were multiple. Many of us, including myself, went in the spirit of cultural exchange. We wanted to talk person to person, student to student, to show that we appreciated their culture by singing their songs. We wanted them to be able to talk with American students to gain some sense of us. 

Some of us wanted to counter the Russian propagandists as we did as a group at the Soviet Youth Festival in 1959 in Helsinki.

Some of us collected data. (I did not, having turned down the invitation of our government.)

Whatever our motivations were, we thought it useful to talk with Russians at a time when our two empires, the Soviet’s and ours, were threatening annihilation -- and we also simply enjoyed communicating with Russians as fellow people.

Now that our own autocratic Trump, tied to Putin and to our own autocratic oligarchs, is threatening our democracy would it not be useful, is it not time, to communicate amongst ourselves as to what we are doing or could do? It can get much worse under T -- another terrorist attack, martial law, further curtailing of civil liberties, further delegitimizing the Press. Democracies are fragile. Ours is threatened by T and by part of our Congress colluding with T, in effect helping Putin to destabilize us. How frightening is it that public opinion can be, and has been, so easily manipulated, that minds are so easily swayed, so poorly grounded?

How terrible that Comey torpedoed Clinton while simultaneously failing to reveal the ongoing counter intelligence investigation of T, thus giving us T. We suppose that McCain could have revealed the story and saved us. Obama did not because he didn’t want to give T the chance to delegitimize the election by calling it rigged.

How terrible that part of the Congress supports T; how terrible that Graham and Grassley want to indict Steele. To what is their allegiance? To whom do they answer? Whose directives do they follow? Clearly not ours.

But again, why should a singing group involve itself in matters political, either as individuals talking to each other, or as a group? Dennis once said that music allows us to overcome differences -- to join in a common effort to create harmony. But that doesn’t exclude the possibility of us coming together with our different perspectives to discuss rationally what we might do or are doing now.

And, of course, music has played an important role in many causes in our time. We may not want to emulate Pussy Riot, not our style, except in their courage in the face of injury and imprisonment. Once, we sang for Odetta, a singer for justice, on a riverboat in Sausalito. There was the solitary musician who played his cello sitting unprotected in a field in Sarajevo in plain sight of the Serbs on the overlooking hills who were firing their rifles to kill men, women and children in the market risking their lives to gather food and water for their families. He later went with Daniel Barenboim to play for peace elsewhere. And Barenboim himself, who brings Palestinian and Israeli youths together to play orchestral music.

One reason for Chorus members to speak amongst ourselves would be to provide a larger and perhaps more meaningful raison d'être, and should we have such “seminars” together, it might be a further way to attract new younger members. There is reason enough to educate ourselves about our autocratic oligarchs and their support for their pawn. 

The Chorus was not just a Russian Glee Club.

                                       John and Ellen Brightly