by By Bryan Watson
Today, Tom Brady retired. It’s been weighing on my mind. Tom Brady is like John Madden or Betty White – cultural icons that have passed. Most people in the US have heard of them. They filled decades. Millions were captivated. Millions leaned on them for a sense of stability in a world constantly locked in a tempest.
They provided cultural stability in the sense that they were a shared experience that unified our consciousness to a certain degree, giving it a certain familiarity, a collectivity, a certain ballast, a shared identity.
That’s remarkable in our time.
A time of severe atomization and a shocking siloing of experience to the point where basic facts of reality are not acknowledged. Our time is one of fictitious capital, NFTs, stratification of reality to the point where it now feels like the exception when we have shared cultural icons.
We increasingly lack commonly shared mediums that can bind experience. I read about multi platinum artists that sell millions that I’ve never heard of. No one listens to the radio. Everyone streams from different TV/video platforms. Reality seems vastly different from Fox to CNN to some influencer.
It’s all so fragmented.
Made worse with no understanding of our commonality – our class status. This has an unmooring effect.
It’s unsettling.
Disorienting.
Harder to recognize our world. Leaves one feeling more isolated. Alienated. Meaningless.
Something is slipping away and what’s filling it’s space is a corrupted, layered, disconnected subjectivity.
What was lost today is more than an exemplary athlete or even a cultural icon.
Today, Tom Brady retired.
Bryan Watson
Bryan Watson is the treasurer of Seattle DSA and a co-chair of its Starbucks Worker Solidarity Committee. He's been a leader in Kshama Sawant's election campaigns in 2013 and 2015, in $15 Now and is now a member of the Reform & Revolution, a Marxist caucus in DSA.
