More Point, Counterpoint

Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, replies to this post of ours in a post on his blog here. In that post, Mr. Kosman declares that our characterizing as courageous classical music critic Alan Rich's attack on would-be classical music critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles is "self-refuting." Writes Mr. Kosman:

The fact that Baer and Pasles cast such comparatively small shadows upon the musical-critical landscape is precisely what makes the act of going after them — and doing it in such a bloodthirsty fashion — so small, and so unworthy.

Either Mr. Kosman is being willfully dense here, or he has a cognitive deficit that's in need of urgent attention.

The entire point of Mr. Rich's attack was not that those two "small shadows upon the musical-critical landscape" are incompetent, but that their incompetent work saw print not in some free-distribution community weekly or the like, but in the Los Angeles Times. Does Mr. Kosman imagine that Mr. Rich would have spent so much as an instant of his time, or wasted so much as a column millimeter of space, flaying such unworthies had not their uninformed work seen daylight in the Times, "the city’s one and only culturally responsive newspaper," as Mr. Rich put it?

Mr. Kosman further declares that,

The inability to distinguish between those two kinds of aggressiveness [directed against worthy targets and against unworthy ones] has always been a flaw in Rich's writing, and it's a flaw that ACD's chest-beating paeans to "courage" and "hair-mussing" and "offensiveness" shares [sic] in spades.

We suggest that in this case it wasn't Mr. Rich's inability to distinguish between those two kinds of aggressiveness (nor ours in characterizing Mr. Rich's aggressiveness as courageous), but rather Mr. Kosman's seeming inability to comprehend the nature of that against which Mr. Rich's aggressiveness was directed.

Thinking on the instant case a bit more, not entirely surprising, actually, Mr. Kosman's inability to comprehend. It's difficult to see things clearly when one's knee has jerked so high that it obstructs one's vision.