B-Rant

- submitted by J.Glarsten on 03/10/2009

  

This 'Bombshell' Vanity Fair Article on Hedge Funds Really Sucks

By J.Glarsten

Just read it. Actually don't. Read the first few paragraphs, you've pretty much read all 4000 paragraphs, interspersed among 4000 ads and expressing essentially the following message that has been expressed in the mainstream media nearly 4000 times already and, before that, in the alternative media (including some of it intelligently) another nearly 4000 times:

Hedge fund managers are greedy. Hedge fund managers are unregulated. Hedge fund managers take a lot of money up front from investors. Hedge fund managers don't let their investors withdraw their money when they want. Hedge fund managers got over-leveraged, misjudged the market and took a bath during -- may even have contributed to! -- the stock market meltdown. Some hedge fund managers are pieces of human garbage. Some aren't. It sucks to lose your money.

These 'revelations' are collected in an article dubbed by VF, "The Hedge Fund Time Bomb" and positioned as the explanation (VF's word) finally of the real story behind the current hedge fund mess.

I hate VF. I forgot I hated VF and why I'd stopped reading it a few years ago. What this piece is is rehashed, endlessly redudant (that's redudant...but to make a point, catching a pattern here?...keep going) crap -- encapsuled in the self-absorbed, tediously, pointlessly name-dropping (I know so many famous people! And they talk to me, I swear!), self-reverential and ultimately numbingly unrevealing VF pop-culture-speak-gazillion-word-Dumb-as-Brad-Pitt-intelligence-sucking-vehicle-for-ads posing as serious journalism. (Got that. No? Good. That's the point, right?) 

And, the ads. I'd dumped VF partly because it had become such a  stunningly dopey promotional rag for the celebrification of everything. But also because I got sick of spending hours wading through the pages searching for the articles obscurely placed among all the ads. You can't even find the f-ing Table of Contents in this magazine. Brilliant.  Shouldn't there be National Magazine Awards for achievements like this? Worst designed magazine if your intent isn't to treat your readers like brain-damaged, wheel-chair-bound automatons. 

Anyway, I'm back with VF. It's too stupidly, unimaginatively reflective of our current culture to ignore and too irresistable not to play with.

Meanwhile if anybody's got a better way to find the actual articles in the magazine -- maybe some kind of script app...of course they don't make scripts for offline use and does anybody actually read VF online? -- please get back to me.
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