Ellen, NO!

Maggie says:
I adore Ellen Degeneres, and I know how uncool that is. I adored her sitcom waaay back when it was still called "These Friends of Mine." And then I adored "Ellen." I think I'd stopped watching by the time she came out on the show, but I thought she was great to do it, and I cheered her on. Her HBO special remains one of the classic stand-up performances for me, because it makes me cry from laughter (her timing and self-deprecation kill me), and then it makes me cry for real when the lesbian in the audience starts crying and Ellen brings her onstage for a hug. Sigh... I'm such a girl. Since I'm never home during the day, I've only seen her talk show a handful of times, but every time it's the same thing: laughing my ass off and smiling at how goofy she is, and how she brings that goofiness out in actors I didn't expect to like.

Now that we're in the midst of the writer's strike, I think it's been a really interesting opportunity for many upper-middle-class Americans who have zero understanding of labor unions and strikes to get a glimpse of that world. They'd never paid attention to union activity until their favorite tv shows started halting production and their favorite celebs were photographed on picket lines in solidarity with writers. And sure, that's a cheap way to get a certain subset of Americans to understand the labor movement, but I think it's significant in that those same Americans who haven't seen the value of unions in their own lives are beginning to understand what it's all about. White-collar disconnect with the labor movement is, to me, a pressing problem in politics today, so I'm optimistic that the WGA strike will connect some dots for folks that have never been connected before, and what little steps forward could come out of that.

All that said, I'm really disappointed that Ellen DeGeneres is standing out as not supporting her writers during the strike. Every other talk-show host I can think of has stood by their writers and halted production - John Stewart raising the bar by continuing to pay his writers personally during the strike. Series actors are supporting their show's writers by standing outside with them instead of filming scenes, and I think that's great. Ellen's first excuse was that she wanted to give a good show to the folks in her audience who had traveled to see her - well, okay, I wanted to give her some credit there because although wrong, it still sounded like something she'd say. But the latest - "it's sweeps" - is about nothing more than money and pricing for commercial spots, not about quality as she suggested. I think the celebrities scheduled to appear on her show should cancel in support of the WGA and as a statement that Ellen should change her tune on her writers, on unions, and on strikes. She's absolutely a bad person in all of this, as much as I hate to say it. While I'm at it, I hope the average People reader follows all of this and decides that supporting labor unions is a very, very good thing for all of us. Is that too much to ask?