Becoming a Citizen-Saboteur

Use your ADD. Sob hysterically. This and more advice for times when Trump threatens to block out the sun.

Is anyone not focused on Stalin?

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In 2019, Game of Thrones went out with a whimper—and a Starbucks cup—on HBO. 19.3 million people watched.

The Ringer called Game of Thrones as “the very last piece of TV monoculture.”

“Monoculture is dead, or will die with Game of Thrones,” wrote Elaine Lui.

In the New Republic, Alex Shephard wrote that we live in a “time of cultural fragmentation,” in which no pop culture object would ever have universal appeal again.

Maybe. But those culture writers of 2019 seem to have been ignoring something happening over on the politics desk. For all the sorrows about how we’ll never all watch Walter Cronkite or Friends together, not ever again, we Americans were, in 2019 as now in 2025, fully enthrall to a dominant spectacle that blocks out the sun more than Game of Thrones ever did. It’s an old-fashioned cartoon reel, it plays on an endless loop, and you know his name.

Yes, we believe we’re fragmented, polarized, and siloed. But that’s only because we have cultivated, at length, competing responses to the cartoon we’re all watching—the one in which the golden-hued Mad King wields a Fred Flintstone club and talks in barky monosyllables.

But what does it matter? Did it matter if the 105.9 million viewers who watched the MASH finale in 1982 liked it or not? It was still monoculture.