The Return of Ruth Rosen

I've received a mountain of faxes and telegrams from desperate readers demanding to know why I've stopped making fun of Ruth Rosen of the San Francisco Chronicle. I figured: hey, I left town for a reason. She's somebody else's problem now. But in the Internet age, everybody has a global audience, including Ruth Rosen and the Shark Blog. So here's a summary of Ruth Rosen's greatest columns of the last few weeks:

May 8: I suspect that Ruth Rosen doesn't have any children of her own (and if she does, they probably don't like her very much), because (a) I haven't seen the tediously self-absorbed paleofeminist mention any of her own offspring in her column, and (b) her Mother's Day celebration column could not have been written by anybody who has ever been treated to flowers and brunch on Mother's Day.

THIS SUNDAY IS Mother's Day. Restaurants are already booked for brunches and dinners. The flower, candy and card industries await their annual spike in sales.

This is soooo 20th century. The women who conceived Mother's Day would be bewildered by our rituals. They would expect us to be marching in the streets, not honored for our individual sacrifices.

So next year folks, please don't buy Mom a card. Drag her to a peace demonstration, where she gets to stand around in the rain with a bunch of unwashed hairy lesbians, listen to crappy music and hold a sign with a silly slogan about learning to solve the world's problems without violence. This won't help protect us from the bad people who want to hurt our country, but it will inspire Mom to keep a safe distance from you.

May 12: Ruth Rosen asks: "McCarthyism happened in this country once before, can it happen again"? The short answer is "yes it can", but then again the reintroduction of slavery and the banning of birth control and interracial marriage are right around the corner too.

May 15: Ruth Rosen admits she has no idea what causes breast cancer, but she really hopes that it is caused by chemicals in the environment. Presumably because it's easier to get the ladies to stage a sit-in against George Bush and corporate polluters than it is to turn them out to protest the advances in public health (such as the reduction in fatalities from maternal complications) which enable more women to live long enough to succumb to breast cancer in the first place.

May 22 Ruth Rosen discovers Google for the first time, years behind the rest of us. She is astonished to discover how much information you can find out about other people by looking them up on the Internet. She closes:

It's a new world. Privacy, it appears, is a thing of the past; get used to it.

Yes, that's right. Privacy has disappeared now that Google operates the 24x7 "Ruth Rosen Toilet Cam". I know I'll be watching.

Just for yuks I looked up "Ruth Rosen" on google. I was delighted to learn that a certain Russell Wardlow, aka Mean Mr. Mustard, donates some of his valuable free time to pummeling the good Dr. Rosen. Keep up the good fight, Russ. The San Francisco Chronicle quality control effort needs you.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at May 25, 2003 11:39 AM