4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, JULY 26, 2018
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
Founded in 1873
JEREMY FELDMAN
Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM
Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
CARL EARL
Systems Manager
WRITER’S NOTEBOOK
Kellow tested
boundaries of
music criticism
It is easier to be
a flatterer than a
critic of substance
he life of Brian Kellow, who grew up in
our corner of America, was emblematic
of the value of a good public education.
He was a graduate of Tillamook High School,
and he made it big in New York City. His
accomplishments weren’t in today’s hot
currency of technology. It
was in music, magazine jour-
nalism and biography.
Kellow died on July 22 at
the age of 59. Brain cancer
was the cause of death. He
made two public appearances
in Astoria over the past 20
STEVE
FORRESTER years, speaking to Columbia
Forum.
A Catholic nun in Tillamook — a piano
teacher — gave Kellow the basic equipment
of musicianship. At Oregon State University
a writing instructor was a particular men-
tor. Speaking at OSU years later, Kellow
recognized that man’s place in his career
development.
With musical and literary skills, Kellow
reached New York in the 1980s. He initially
found work in the cultural hotbed of the 92nd
Street Y. In 1988 he joined the editorial staff
of Opera News magazine, one of classical
music’s most influential publications. Being a
musician gave Kellow an advantage in writing
music criticism.
Fred Cohn, who wrote Opera News’ obit-
uary of Kellow, described his editorial talent.
“I myself once turned in a feature that led
with two paragraphs of foofaraw; Brian took
out his red pencil and found the exact right
T
opening. He would encourage his writers to
burrow deep — to avoid the anodyne and pro-
vide the telling, even gritty details that would
give a story interest and depth.”
In the upper reaches of classical music
criticism, it is easier to be a flatterer than a
critic of substance. Kellow tested that bound-
ary when he wrote a memorable column
in Opera News that disparaged one of the
Metropolitan Opera’s biggest investments
in set design — for its Ring Cycle. Kellow’s
larger point was that when stage gimmickry
gets in the way of a work’s essence, priorities
are backward. The board of the Metropolitan
Opera Guild — particularly one of its most
prominent members — did not like Kellow’s
column. I was not surprised when, several
months later, Brian wondered if I knew of
job opportunities in his field in the Pacific
Northwest. He landed at Florida Grand Opera
as public relations manager.
Another startling Kellow column
described his becoming a Roman Catholic. He
recounted growing up in a household that was
forcefully agnostic. Since Brian was openly
gay, becoming Catholic was a somewhat
puzzling choice.
Among Kellow’s biographical subjects
were the Broadway legend Ethel Merman and
the film critic Pauline Kael.
The last time my wife and I saw Kellow
was June 2016. He and his husband emerged
from the press room at the San Francisco
Opera, prior to a performance of Don Carlo.
Under Kellow’s arm was a laptop computer.
It contained the text of the novel he’d long
talked about. He wouldn’t let the laptop out
of his sight. That piece of fiction was set in
Tillamook — a coming-of-age story, I expect.
I hope one day we will see it.
Steve Forrester, the former editor and pub-
lisher of The Daily Astorian, is the president
and CEO of EO Media Group.
Kurt Sneddon
Brian Kellow was a graduate of Tillamook High School who made it big in New York City.
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GUEST COLUMN
Democrats are moving left — don’t panic
I
n November, several outright Nazis
and white supremacists will appear on
Republican ballot lines.
Arthur Jones, a founder of a neo-Nazi
group called the America First Committee,
managed to become the Republican nominee
for Congress in the heavily Democratic 3rd
District in Illinois. The Republican candidate
in California’s 11th District, John Fitzgerald,
is running on a platform of Holocaust denial.
Russell Walker, a Republican
statehouse candidate in
North Carolina, has said that
Jews descend from Satan
and that God is a “white
supremacist.”
Corey Stewart, Virginia’s
MICHELLE Republican Senate nominee,
GOLDBERG is a neo-Confederate who
pals around with racists,
including one of the organizers of the violent
Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last
year. The longtime Iowa Republican, Rep.
Steve King, has moved from standard-issue
nativist crank to full-on white nationalist;
he recently retweeted a neo-Nazi and then
refused to delete the tweet, saying, “It’s the
message, not the messenger.”
Clearly, the time has come for a serious
national conversation. And so political
insiders across the land are asking: Has the
Democratic Party become too extreme?
Everywhere you look lately, centrists
are panicking about the emboldened left.
Moderates, reported Alex Seitz-Wald of
NBC News, “are warning that ignoring them
will lead the party to disaster in the midterm
elections and the 2020 presidential contest.”
Former Sen. Joe Lieberman wrote in The
Wall Street Journal that the primary victory
of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of
the Democratic Socialists of America, over
Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., “seems likely to
hurt Congress, America and the Democratic
Party.” James Comey, former director of the
FBI, tweeted, “Democrats, please, please
don’t lose your minds and rush to the socialist
left,” arguing that “America’s great middle
wants sensible, balanced, ethical leadership.”
Though Comey’s judgment about things
that affect political campaigns is not good, I
think he’s sincere in wanting Democrats to
win in November. But his worry is misplaced.
Partly, this is because Democrats are not,
in fact, rushing to the socialist left in great
numbers.
“Overall, it’s not really true that the
insurgent leftist candidates, like the candidates
who are affiliated with the DSA or Bernie
Sanders’ group, are doing all that well,” said
Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at
Emory University who specializes in partisan
polarization.
With many of this year’s primary races
completed, Crowley is the only Democratic
congressional incumbent so far to lose to a
challenger from his left. Ocasio-Cortez is a
bright, exciting new figure in the Democratic
Party, but she doesn’t define it.
And even people like Comey — cen-
ter-right figures who are momentarily allied
with Democrats because they abhor President
Donald Trump — should be cheered by the
energy that Ocasio-Cortez and others like her
are creating. In the midterms, passion is likely
to matter more than appeals to an ever-shrink-
ing pool of swing voters, who at any rate
tend to be idiosyncratic economic populists
rather than the judicious centrists of Beltway
imagination.
I’m not wholly unsympathetic to people
of good faith who want Democrats to win
in November, but who fear that the United
States is more conservative than left-wing
activists like to believe. I grew up at a time
when Democrats were deeply afraid of liberal
overreach. For many of the people who taught
me about politics, the debacle of George
McGovern’s 1972 rout was formative. Its
lessons were reinforced by the overwhelming
defeat of Michael Dukakis, who was painted
as soft on crime and mocked by George H.W.
Bush for being a “card-carrying member of
the ACLU,” as if concern for civil liberties
was shameful. I wasn’t old enough to vote
when Bill Clinton was first elected, but I
remember what a relief it was when he broke
the Republicans’ 12-year stranglehold on the
White House, and how necessary and worth-
while his compromises seemed.
Now, however, Hillary Clinton’s defeat has
overshadowed McGovern’s as the Democratic
Party’s paradigmatic trauma. There are sev-
eral lessons you can draw from her loss, some
of them conflicting — some voters saw her
as too corporate, others as too liberal. But it’s
clear that in a polarized electorate, grassroots
fervor and a candidate’s charisma matter a lot,
and an agenda that seems too modest can be
as risky as one that appears overly ambitious.
After all, the economic demands that
animate the left are generally quite popular.
Though “Medicare For All” means different
things to different people, a Kaiser Family
Foundation poll from 2017 found that 62 per-
cent of Americans view it positively. A recent
Rasmussen poll found 46 percent of likely
voters support a federal jobs guarantee, a
more radical proposal that was barely present
in U.S. politics a couple of years ago.
Centrists might not think these are good
ideas, but they are not wild fantasies; they
represent efforts to grapple with the chronic
economic insecurity that is the enemy of
political stability.
Democrats will not defeat Trump and his
increasingly fanatical, revanchist party by
promising the restoration of what came before
him; the country is desperate for a vision of
something better. Whether or not you share
that vision, if you truly believe that Trump is
a threat to democracy, you should welcome
politics that inspire people to come to democ-
racy’s rescue.
Michelle Goldberg is a syndicated colum-
nist for the New York Times News Service.