James Wolcott, who continues to write like he should be the fifth girl on Sex and the City, shockingly takes Juan Cole’s side. I’m devastated, of course.
Now, as I conceded Juan Cole is an expert on the Middle East. But Wolcott is an expert on….what? I saw in the latest issue of Vanity Fair he’s writing about latenight cable lesbianism. I bow to his expertise there. And I’d take his “argument” about me more seriously (even his unceasingly unoriginal and catty fat jokes), but he almost never makes arguments. Indeed, from what I’ve been able to tell, Wolcott’s simply the middle-brow wordsmith Vanity Fair signed on to make sunbathing second wives in the Hamptons feel like they’re intellectuals while they get their pedicures. I wouldn’t debate Juan Cole about the Middle East for the same reason I wouldn’t debate Paul Krugman about economics.
Nevertheless, about American politics or foreign policy, I’d have no problem or reluctance debating either of them. And as for Wolcott, I cannot imagine there is a subject I would be undermatched to debate him on, save perhaps on how he manages to keep a straight face while he musters the nerve to call anybody else in the English-speaking world a “hack.”
But I do think Wolcott’s prredictable bitchy-lefty approach to this whole thing illuminates something interesting. Obviously, Wolcott doesn’t speak arabic and knows certainly no more about the Middle East than me. Yet there’s no doubt Cole will celebrate Wolcott’s endorsement even though according to Cole’s own criteria, Wolcott is no more qualified to have a worthwhile opinion on any of this than I am. Moreover, the fact that Jimmy Wolcott seriously thinks Cole talks like a professor simply illustrates the partisan hackery he ascribes to me. Wolcott thinks Cole is professorial not because of Cole’s scholarship — and certainly not because of his prose — but because Wolcott agrees with Cole about Bush, Iraq and me. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’m cherry-picking my experts (including the various arabic speaking Iraqi bloggers). But Wolcott operates from the assumption that if Cole agrees with him, he must be an unimpeachable scholar. That sounds more like narcissism than judgment.