Carson Nov 13^th

Trump ranted for an hour and a half last night and some of it was about Dr. Ben Carson. He said that Carson was “pathological; his own words.” He was right; Carson did say that about himself referring, of course, to his youthful behavior. Carson describes many youthful events that show a seriously troubled kid: hitting a friend in the face with a padlock, trying to stab another boy with a knife that, very fortunately, hit the belt buckle on the boy’s pants and then broke. There were other events as well. To put the kindest face on them, many are thought to be apocryphal. Carson, like the good conservative he is, blames the media for what he claims is excessive scrutiny.

Much of his background story appears in his books and because of that it is difficult to claim, as politicians often do, that he misspoke, or that his remarks were taken out of context. In today’s “Daily Mail” some of his backstory is quite successfully deconstructed. He claimed that his mother was one of 24 children; she wasn’t; she was one of thirteen. He claimed his mother divorced his father because the father was a bigamist; there is no evidence for that. The Daily Mail presents very complete documentation for all of their challenges. In addition they show that Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard did a very sloppy job of tracing Carson’s life history, as he did with a couple of other people, sloppy enough so that PBS cancelled his show. It will resume next year but with another genealogist and two more people “assisting” Gates.

There are online pictures of the interior of Carson’s home. The place is a shrine to Carson’s achievements; it serves as a showplace for his many trophies. At least one entire wall is completely covered with beautifully framed awards Carson has received, and there are lots and lots of these. There is also a portrait of a seated and smiling Carson with a smiling Jesus standing just behind him and with his hand on Carson’s shoulder.

Carson’s enormous success is important to him, as it should be. He has come a long way from a Detroit ghetto to become the pre-eminent pediatric neurosurgeon in the country. The important point here is to note just how far Carson has come. The further he has come the more credit he deserves. Now if he can construct a scenario in which he was in even more desperate circumstances as a child and as a young man, then that means he will deserve even more credit for elevating himself above the horrible circumstances of his childhood. This might explain his need to insist on these stories about his abysmal childhood.

If you want the maximum credit available for climbing out of a hole then make sure everyone knows that the hole was really, really deep.