ESPN looks up, finds nadir

In a piece for ESPN the Magazine on Barry Bonds, Bill Simmons drops this little boy in an aside:

the Smithsonian doesn't ignore nadirs in this country's history like slavery, Hiroshima or Vanilla Ice.

Cheers for using the word “nadir.” I would have guessed that no ESPN writers even knew what the world meant, much less that they could correctly use it in a sentence.

Jeers for his choice of nadirs beyond slavery. Did none of the editors (if there are any) at ESPN.com think to point out that maybe Hiroshima was not considered by a plurality of Americans to be a nadir? Or is this groupthing at its finest? 200+ years, and he comes up with Hiroshima?

If he wanted a bombing, couldn’t he have at least picked Nagasaki? As the descendant of someone who fought in the Pacific in World War 2, I’m kind of glad that we didn’t lose hundreds of thousands more soldiers in the island hopping campaign, perhaps including my grandfather, which perhaps means I wouldn’t have been born.

And Vanilla Ice? He broke the rap color barrier and allowed white rappers to flourish, like Eminem and, uh, all those other guys. Where we would we be today without him? In a much poorer place.