I wasn't the most academic child. I apologise for the roundabout introduction but I'm anything but straightforward and the Masters degree doesn't allow me to exhibit the full measure of my literary flair. They frown upon all uses of the first person in written work and admonish any lack of objectivity. I've come to the conclusion that the soul of journalism is to strive for objectivity knowing full well that you'll never quite get there.
I got lost somewhere in that opening paragraph so I'll have another go at it.
I wasn't the most academic child. It wasn't for a lack of cleverness but that was a fact that very nearly killed my mother. That she'd managed to beget a fairly intelligent child who lost interest in anything that could be regarded as work was completely intolerable. At the worst of my lazy episodes I was taken for deliverance at a popular church called the Mountain of Fire and stoned with Gifted Hands - Ben Carson's Autobiography. The liberals among you mustn't utter a word of complaint about the way my mother mothered me. The job of a tiger mother is not only to take her child to the proverbial pond, it is also to force it to drink that water. A true tiger mother will do anything to achieve this aim. We all have our faults.
Gifted Hands became a little bit like a Bible for me. If Ben Carson could go from carrying the weight of his class (this is a euphemism for coming last) then I could elevate myself from the rear of my class and transplant myself at the top. If Ben Carson had had two heads I'd have given up, but he only had one so whatever he'd achieved was also achievable by me. It was Ben Carson that lit a fire under my arse and got me to take the 6th grade seriously. If I hadn't I wouldn't have gone to that boarding school that all Nigerians call the local jail for children and I wouldn't be who I am now. Yes, it may not be very believable but the book was that influential. After reading it I believed that there was nothing in the world that hard work couldn't surmount. Good old Ben was second to Jesus, only a few places above his counterpart in profound disappointment, Bill Cosby. And to be honest I find that I am more disappointed in Ben than I am in Bill. Cosby may not admit to the world that he is a sexual offender, but there is no way that he can go without knowing it. When over two dozen people accuse you of something, even those of us that think ourselves innocent will begin to see how we are guilty. The same is not true of idiocy, especially when there has been ample opportunity for education. Idiocy is a solitary crusade for not only does it mean that you do not know, it also means that you do not know where you may go to know and that even if you did know you wouldn't care to.
Over the course of his campaign, I have made the following faces.
This one was when he implied that he doesn't see racism as a major social issue in America. I "doesn't" understand it. I can see racism in America from my window in Lagos so how is it that someone that lives there doesn't see it? Racism should be pointed out even when it hides in a myriad of other issues. Racism should be pointed out even when it makes you the black guy that's always pointing out racist things. In Ferguson he saw no racism. He said that the problems there were caused by a lack of education and respect. He said, "Education is the great divide... Children need to understand that they have to get a good education.” The problem here is that you can't see education but you can see colour.
"one of the reasons that you find most of their clinics in black
neighborhoods is so that you can find way to control that population"
When I heard that, it occurred to me that Ben may not exactly be normal. Most of us refrain from speaking about subjects that we know little or nothing about, but not Mr Carson. The Egyptian antiquities minister Mamdouh el-Damaty said, "does he even deserve a response? He doesn't", at a news conference about recent thermal scans of the pyramid
Egypt’s head of ancient antiquities, Mahmoud Afifi added: "A lot of people are trying to prove that the pyramids weren’t built for burials. Maybe they’re comments used for publicity like that man who’s not an archaeologist and says they stored grain, and I don’t know what that was based on."
One of the things I love about the Bible's creation story is that it doesn't tell you how anything really happened, and we don't really know how long anything took. "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."(2 Peter 3:8). And there's this other quote from Isaiah, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD.
So apart from if God personally told Ben Carson these things, I can't see how he could be so dismissive of scientific theory.
They tell you that there’s a war on women. There is no war on women. There may be a war on what’s inside of women.
“You can operate for 10, 15, 18 hours on a kid, and if you’re successful, the reward my be 50, 60, 70 years of life. Whereas with an old geezer, you spend all that time, and they die in five years of something else! So, you see, Monica and I, we like to get a good return on investment.”
This one is essentially hate speech.
There are a ton of them I didn't use. I didn't quote him on gay people and jail. I didn't transcribe his jokes about Auschwitz. I didn't write about the time he compared Obama to the devil. I didn't write about the lies he told in Gifted Hands. I didn't even write about the time that he said that American are more stupid than they think they are (if there's any American that's perhaps a little less clever than he thinks, it's him). And I definitely left out his comments on fox news.
"Even if all the media tries to shut you down—which they have tried very much to do with me," he said. "But they can't because the good Lord has provided me with mechanisms like my syndicated column and like Fox News. We'd be Cuba if there were no Fox News."
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