Better Angels of Our Nature My Ass: Bill Gross Is a Lousy Writer

The first thing I thought of when I saw Izabella's headline: "Bill Gross: Mystic" was Lincoln's First Inaugural Address which contains the best turn of phrase containing the word 'mystic' that you are likely to find:

"The mystic chords of memory"

Then I read Gross.
OMG

From FT Alphaville:

Gnostic mystics and Michael Fowke stand aside. A new financial shaman has emerged from the shadowlands of betaville. He is the One whose function it is to return the flock to the alpha source. Long prophesied by the ancients. Incarnated in this latest rendition of the eternal cycle simply as Gross.

And it is He who provides us with the following great revelation this Monday:

I am a philosophical nomad disguised in Western clothing, a wondering drifter, masquerading in a suit near a California beach. Sand forms the foundation of my being and its porosity is at once my greatest strength and deepest wound. I have become after 70 years, a man who believes that no belief is sacred. I have ideals and moral standards, but I believe them specific to me. Had I inherited your body and ego, “I” could just as clearly have assumed “yours.”

If so, I wonder, if values are relative, then what are mortals to make of them, and what would a judging God make of us? If a collective humanity is to be rooted in sandy loam, spreading its ideological seeds through howling winds only to root in mutant form at different places and different times, can we judge an individual life?

Fear not the redemptions of your bond fund soul....MORE

He goes on like that, sounding like a pseudo-sophisticated 15-year old to the point that Janus has to be at least a wee bit concerned.

Lincoln on the other hand was attempting to preserve the nation by force of rhetoric. From that same Inaugural speech:

...will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

It didn't work, as a month later the rebels bombed Fort Sumter, but at least you could understand what Lincoln was saying. 
And Gross? Ya got me.

In 2011's "PIMCO's Bill Gross Tells Investors About The Time He Acted Like A Cheap Prick To A Waitress" we linked to the WSJ's Matt Phillips on Gross:

...MarketBeat picked up on the waitress story but appears to take particular umbrage at the very notion of Mr. Gross' literary stylings:

Bill Gross: His Most Obnoxious Note Ever!

Where should we start? Bond king — or former bond king? – Bill Gross is out with his monthly investment outlook note. Mr. Gross is not merely satisfied managing the world’s largest bond fund. (Pimco Total Return Fund: $240.7 billion in assets in December.) Nay, he fancies himself something of a scribe, and his monthly investment outlook is where he talks his book for a few hundred words spicing it up with some belabored metaphors and a self-serving analogy, or several. But there are a few things that stick in our craw about this month’s note....MORE 

That is professional pixilator Matt Phillips.

[Don't mind Mr. C, he's trying to combine the computer science term pixelate with a word for whimsical/bemused.  el vs. il. I prefer the second of these definitions -ed]