While renewing my New Yorker subscription a couple of months ago, magazine publishing giant Condé Nast offered me a deal that seemed too good to pass up: 12 issues of culture/fashion/politics magazine Vanity Fair for 12 dollars. That’s right — for the price of a taco a month I would have some of the world’s finest photography and writing delivered right to my doorstep. A Vanity Fair article, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, served as the basis for the amazing Michael Mann film The Insider. So I thought “Why not?”

Ugh.

Fun fact: If you have XX chromosomes, the chances of you being naked on a Vanity Fair cover approach 100%

I’d make a joke here about how the best part of my Vanity Fair experience so far has been Gisele Bündchen’s breasts, but the magazine beats me to the punch by proudly announcing on the cover “‘How I’ll Solve the Financial Crisis!’ Scratch That. But She Does Pose Naked…!” This is what passes for wit and charm over at the head office.

And honestly, the profile of Bündchen in the May issue has probably been the best-written article I’ve encountered so far. The rest of the material in the magazine is positively execrable, especially its political writing and commentary. I’ve read 5000 words on the American Dream that comes off as an essay from a remedial civics student in which, when I got to the end, I had no idea what the point was. Something about connecting to our roots? Vanity Fair’s idea of biting political commentary is “How about those right-wing pundits, huh? They’re a bit behind the times, aren’t they?” Guess who else is behind the times, Mr. Editor Graydon Carter? I can get this level of insight from Wonkette, and they also get to post amazing animated .gifs of Hu Jintao morphing into Suge Knight.

The financial crisis is a sobering and gargantuan event, and perhaps you expect Vanity Fair to tackle it with finesse. After all, Rolling Stone—Rolling Stone, for Christ’s sake—has some excellent work done by Matt Taibbi. But no, they’ve instead decided to run about two hundred pieces on Bernie Madoff and people Bernie Madoff swindled and swindlers like Bernie Madoff and Madoff Madoff Madoff; by focusing on a cheap and easy morality tale they miss the systemic and ugly problems of corporate capitalism that should be publicly indicted. I think Highlights did a Goofus and Gallant about it a few months back. And it’s not like they don’t have the talent to pull it off; financial writer Michael Lewis did a fantastic piece for sister publication Condé Nast Portfolio. But his article for Vanity Fair about Iceland’s part in the financial crisis comes off as some bizarre alien travelogue in which Iceland’s hyper-leveraging and collapse comes from their Viking DNA, like they’re some weird subspecies of humanity. This unsettling focus on ethnic and cultural stratification crops up everywhere; William Langewiesche’s April piece on Somali piracy is more of a vaguely racist pulp adventure tale and features such gems as

The pirates for their part let pass the chance to experience creative French cuisine, and chose instead to prepare a concoction of dried meat fried in rancid oil and shredded into a starchy spaghetti mash, which they ate out of a communal bowl with unwashed fingers. It was a small but disconcerting moment for the civilized world—evidence of the anarchy that prevails where nations fail and savagery threatens Canada. Luckily for the French, the bartender, Bertrand Viallet, had filled some thermoses with aperitifs, which helped to ease the trauma.

I could go on with a litany of Vanity Fair’s literary sins, from how their collages look like a tween girl’s scrapbook to how when they run out of pretty pictures they cram the rest of the article in the back with the fashion credits. You might (rightly) attribute my indignation to some level of class hatred—June’s photo spread of 38 heirs and heiresses, however beautifully photographed, can seem like a hit list in the eyes of a populist—but that’s because Vanity Fair is all about class. It’s about the message it sends sitting on your coffee table, with its glossy photos and expensive ads and cultural cachet. It’s Us Weekly for the private jet-set, or more accurately, for those who yearn to be in that set.

Yes, it has excellent photography. That just means you could delete every single word from Vanity Fair and it would communicate just as much as it does now. It’d be a better publication, too.