Why Is Ellen Still Here?

I know there's a lot going on right now, but I have to ask--

Why is Ellen still here?

Debates about cancel culture aside, I have not seen someone so thoroughly dragged continue on with their career as though absolutely nothing happened at all.

I'm tempted to compare Ellen's protection by the people she makes money for to Chris Brown, but I know some of you would come at me for saying Ellen never did anything as bad as assaulting someone, and you'd be right, but I can't think of another example of someone having their true, awful self broadcast to the world only to end up keeping their career.

Even Brown saw his career take a nosedive, whereas Ellen's entire career is predicated around her talk show, and aside from some gossip about the show being cancelled (most likely created by the show itself to create the illusion of possible consequences), the show has not changed at all. I was flipping channels the other day and saw that it was on. I stopped. Watched a bit.

And you know that annoying thing Ellen does that she was called out on where she's teasing someone about something and the implication is that she's just kidding and she really likes the person but anyone who has spent more than five seconds around literally any gay person can tell you that all that disdain is real?

Yeah, she's still doing that.

Even the people I know who are weary of Cancel Culture admit that some kind of apology should be involved if you are, in fact, cancelled, and let's not forget--

Ellen not only didn't apologize for being a monster, she also threw other people under the bus rather than own up to anything or take any accountability.

This was within the same year (I think? Who knows?) when Amy Klobuchar was determined unfit to be President because she got mad at an intern who was so stupid they couldn't find a fork in an airport and she had to eat a salad with a comb and then asked the intern to clean the comb.

I find that story perfectly reasonable.

If I'm starving and you tell me you couldn't find a fork in an airport, you're way more likely to get stabbed with the comb after I'm done using it.

That was just one specific story about Klobuchar.

We have...literally dozens of stories of Ellen being horrible to the point where it's safe to assume that she's just not a nice person.

Now, was she ever a nice person?

Maybe?

It seems like we're all coming to the conclusion that it's really hard to give a person millions of dollars every year and unlimited fame without them going over to the dark side.

Case in point--J.K. Rowling seemingly not giving one flying #$%^ about how she's torpedoed her own career with her transphobia.

She's got billions of dollars and all of you were still posting excitedly about that new Harry Potter show on HBO Max, so yeah, I'm not sure how much your Twitter jabs are really getting to her.

Unlike Ellen, Rowling still had a degree of relevancy when she started airing her bullshit, and so I guess you could argue that, oddly enough, Ellen's lower degree of fame actually helped protect her from true retribution.

After all, the Mom's who watch her show are most likely not doom-scrolling through Twitter every hour on the hour like I am.

Post on Twitter that Ellen is an ogre and nobody is surprised.

Post on Facebook and you will start more fires than you could hope to put out.

We also seem to have this weird criteria for what merits cancelling someone, where if nothing sexual happened and there's no physical element, you can essentially torture everyone around you for years and then sort of half-apologize and you get to go back to giving Target checks to a kid in a viral YouTube video because they did a funny impersonation of Christopher Walken.

Aside from everything she did off-screen, Ellen has helped contribute immeasurably to the kind of reward-the-least culture that we find ourselves in now. 

How many of us have seen some mildly funny ten-second clip online of a toddler doing something amusing only to scroll down and see their aunt in the comments, in all caps/screaming "ELLEN DID YOU SEE THIS?"

The sad part is, oftentimes, that worked.

Before Jimmy Fallon was making Dame Judi Dench play F***, Marry, Kill with him on The Tonight Show, Ellen had mastered the art of content over creativity.

And before you say something about it being daytime television, I want to remind you that Mike Douglas was daytime television. Phil Donahue was daytime television. Oprah had housewives reading Toni Morrison.

Daytime television used to offer a lot of intellectual stimulation, and what Ellen is offering has less substance than one of those ads you see at the gas station while you're returning the nozzle.

The fact that the reason Ellen still has a show is most likely because, while her show makes boatloads of money, nobody actually cares that she has a show is some kind of weird inverse immunity wherein you can't be held accountable for anything unless you can demonstrate that you're in some way culturally influential seems...bad?

One of the biggest criticisms of Cancel Culture is that it's not distributed evenly, and the answer seems obvious--

It's a culture that was created by people who are looking to take down the influential, but what qualifies as influential is going to be different depending on who you ask.

Twitter was totally fine with dragging Ellen for sport, but they weren't calling for the same actions against her as they were for other people who've behaved just as badly, and the reason was because they just didn't think Ellen was worth it.

Cancel Culture can be about costing someone their job, but I suspect for many people, the ultimate punishment would be something Cher talked about as being "the worst thing" and that is--

Being uncool.

If you're already uncool, and Ellen is the undisputed Queen of Uncool, then why should you change even after you're called out?

It's not going to make you any cooler.

Meanwhile, you're on television every day, with an hour dedicated to you, and an army of Dancing Moms willing to do your bidding provided you supply them with inoffensive humor and the occasional video of one of your staff members jumping out of a box and scaring Justin Timberlake.

And you know, when you put it that way, forcing Ellen to keep doing her show might be the worst punishment of all.