AMS HYPOCRISY

You can see, then, why I find the AMS resolution so pompous. The society condemns outlandish abuses of music and people in remote prisons while it undermines the role of its membership at home. In doing so, the AMS parades in lockstep with other contemporary institutions, for which Enlightenment rhetoric masks the disfigurations of capitalism, and big, idealistic statements muffle the groans of social division and injustice. Still, it’s worth asking how people who teach, perform, and study the most harmonious of arts can generate so much discord and hidden resentment among their younger colleagues, who are expected to lick their wounds in dark corners and forever remain silent, because torture, abuse, and violence, in whatever form and dosage, exist only elsewhere.