On February 11, 2025, IPK Fellow Leif Weatherby penned a guest essay for The Point titled “Permanent Decline: The long, slow end of Aaron Rodgers, the American man, and U.S. empire.” Read the excerpt below, then click for the full article.

In that moment after four whole plays in one game in 2023, that moment where he knew, but maybe didn’t quite believe, that his Achilles had popped, you can see the epic ambivalence of the American male. Ralph Waldo Emerson, attempting to grapple with the death of his beloved son, wrote, “up again, old heart.” Grief begins with suspension, which becomes the struggle with denial. How to accept the rupture of the tendon, the death of the child. Not all grief is nationally televised.

At some point, though, acceptance comes. There will be no second ring, no absolute proof that you were not a fluke. If Aaron returns to the field in 2025, even having flashed a bit more athleticism down the stretch of 2024, recovering slowly, as anyone would, from the tear, it’s hard to imagine how he’d get back to the Big Game.

The grief setting in in that frozen moment, the pain in his eyes, the hand on his hip, before he voluntarily goes down, is the realization that there is no second act of the same kind. The man and the empire he represented as he flew that flag on 9/11 22 years later have entered decline; now they have to decide how to be in the middle third of life. First as quarterback, then as man, and nothing more.

Read the full article here.