It’s a bit brutal to watch so many of Ben Carson’s self-glorifying stories from his biography turn out to be either wildly exaggerated, completely bogus or as in the case of this Yale exam story, as Catherine Thompson explains here, so utterly byzantine and convoluted as to defy categorization. Adding to the surreal situation is what I noted last week which is that Carson’s operation looks very much like a direct mail fundraising scam gone wrong – or actually horribly right. When I was researching this last week, I was struck that not only did Carson’s campaign seem like a fundraising scam but that his campaign had attracted a slew of nominally ‘pro-Carson’ SuperPacs trying to grab some of the tons of money off the Carson phenomenon, run a few nominal ads and pocket the rest as costs. Now one of the many ‘pro-Carson’ SuperPacs is out asking patients to come forward to say good things about him.
Now unless the fibbing and self-glorifying exaggerations go considerably further than we realize, Carson was a highly accomplished pediatric neurosurgeon. So it’s hard to imagine there aren’t a lot of people who he helped with their brains willing to say good things about him. This would seem to set the bar quite low.
In any case, the Carson story, as Brian Beutler notes here, is really an indictment of the wingnut-entertainment complex, to the extent that Carson’s been a big star on the conservative speaking/booking circuit for years and apparently no one has cared to scrutinize even the most elementary parts of his biography. Not just things that needed to be researched but stories that are ridiculous on their face – like saying you were turned down a scholarship at a school that doesn’t charge tuition.
Two things stand out to me about this spectacle.
First, none of this is really particularly surprising if you’re at all familiar with the many centuries, actually many millenia, history of biographical redemption narratives. I know some of this literature from my own days studying Calvinist salvation stories from 17th century New England and England. But the tradition goes much, much further back. Go back to St. Augustine’s Confessions, where Augustine, somewhat notoriously, felt the need to gild the lily of his own pre-Christian profligacy and debauchery to dramatize the scale and miraculous nature of his conversion.
Same with Carson.
Carson is now simultaneously catching heat for the iffy accuracy of his purported early history of violence before he got religion as a young teenager and heat from opponents for being an early teen hoodlum. Truly getting it from both sides.
But everything we know about Carson suggests that from his earliest days he was the same highly earnest and even nerdy dude that he is today in his mid-60s. But Earnest Nerd from Day One! just lacks the necessary drama. So Carson appears to have manufactured or wildly exaggerated some young misbehavior to conveal a perfectly creditable story of a shy, bookish childhood.
The other stories too have a similar theme. It seems at least that there’s a kernel of truth in the West Point and Yale exam ‘hoax’ stories. Given what we know about Carson, it’s not terribly hard to believe that he was one of the few students who got taken in by hoax and showed up for the exam retake. And maybe someone there said, wow, Ben you’re the honestest most straight arrowest student at Yale!
In each of these cases, you get the sense of a tiny kernel of truth which was told and embellished countless times until it congealed into its current fairly preposterous form, making up one part of the Ben Carson morality tale. To be clear, Carson’s personal story is plenty laudable enough on its own. He was born into impoverished home, with a determined single mother with a very limited education and with determination and hard work he went to the country’s best schools and became an accomplished surgeon. That’s pretty good. But so many of the set-piece stories along the way sound like classic fish tales. Carson once had a two pound Largemouth Bass on his line and through a hundred retellings, it became a hundred pound monster that ate Carson’s fishing partner and only got away after trying to devour Carson himself.
In other words, yarns. Classic yarns.
The only amazing thing is that no one seems to have questioned any of it until now. And the most animated, even outraged, we’ve ever seen Carson is over the last few days when he experiences the totally unaccustomed shock of being asked to explain these set piece stories which in most cases are bogus in most of their particulars.
