Saturday, October 27, 2018

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

That time the FT's Izabella Kaminska sliced-up Bill Gross like a Canadian fishing guide gutting walleyes.
Originally posted November 3, 2014:

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
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.