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Etan Thomas is the Man

Check out his recent SLAM article

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 8:44 and is filed under Boring, non-political crap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Etan Thomas is the Man”

  • 1
    eli
    April 21st, 2007 14:10

    Wow, Etan is my new hero. He should be inspirational for everybody working in a job where they feel cut off from public life. We all become so habituated to performing our work in our narrow professional spheres, whether it’s basketball, business, law, engineering, academics, or flipping burgers. This can make us so insular that we often become distracted from participating in public debates, and we mistake the corporate interest of our team, law firm, discipline, or law firm, for the interest of the public as a whole, and then we lose sight of the universal moral values, like equality, that we would argue for in public debates. Against this trend, Etan Thomas breaks out of the shell of his profession to take part in the public sphere. As he draws inspiration and models from his heroes, such as Muhammad Ali and Bill Russell, so we should see them and Etan as our heroes. Thanks to the blogosphere, we don’t have to let Etan speak for us, but can try to emulate him and speak for ourselves. And yet, to think that everyone has access to the blogosphere would be delusional (or that any of us have nearly as big net-megaphones as Etan does - though potentially we could). We privileged, college-educated, computer-owning, liberals also have duties to follow Etan: “Using my position as a platform to speak my mind is something that I feel obligated to do. Giving voice to the voiceless. Saying what many people would love to say but just don’t have the public ear or the microphone with which to say it.”
    In my post a few weeks ago about “ethical spectacles,” I had criticized spectator sports for being unethical spectacles. But now I retract that blanket generalization, in light of Etan’s use of his spectacular profession to build himself a platform from which to make ethical contributions to public debates.

  • 2
    vijay
    April 21st, 2007 16:28

    see also adonal foyle and steve nash (and, if you’re so inclinded, tiki barber)

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