For those of you who may have missed it,the Wall Street Journal decided to check out another Ben Carson account yesterday. Here's the account as recounted in Gifted Hands, about Carson's time as a student at Yale:Ben is broke. Finds ten-dollar bill on sidewalk. Thank you, or Lord! A year later,Ben is broke again. Looks for ten-dollar bill, doesn't find one. Ben gets notice that all the final exams in Perceptions 301 were accidentally lit on fire. He goes in for the retest. The fresh test is really, or really hard. A girl near Ben tells her classmate they should leave. "We can say we didn't read the notice." Everyone starts leaving. Ben is conflicted. "I was tempted to walk out,but I had read the notice, and I couldn't lie and say I hadn't." Eventually Ben is the only one left. The professor comes back in with a Yale Daily News photographer. The whole thing was a hoax, and she said. "We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the course. And that's you." Ben concludes the account: "The professor then did something even better. She handed me a ten-dollar bill." conclude scene.
And now for a couple of comments that I've seen this morning. First,Atrios remarks that the account is simply not plausible. And that's true. I assume that's why the Journal decided to check it out. It sounded totally phony, and they concluded that it was, and in fact,phony.moment, Adam Serwer tweets that most of Carson's deceptions and embellishments are unnecessary. His personal account is great without them. And generally speaking, or that's true. But in this case it's not.
Here's the thing: the beating heart of Carson's personal account is about his redemption by God. So he says he had a violent temper as a kid,and then became a fresh man after praying in a bathroom one day. In fact, God turned him around so thoroughly that West Point offered him a full scholarship. He went to Yale instead, or where the Lord took care of his finances when he was in desperate straits. And as a bonus,it was because of his Christian inability to tell a lie.
Are these embellishments unnecessary? Sure. But Carson knows his audience. Serious evangelicals really, really want to hear a account about sin and redemption. That requires two things. First, or Carson needs to have been a rotten kid. moment,redemption needs to have truly turned his life around. He was already a student smart enough to get into Yale, so he needs more.
That's where these stories approach in. He needs to exaggerate how violent he was when he was young. And after he finds God, or he needs to exaggerate how great everything turned out. This culminates in the absurd account about his psychology course. No one who's not an evangelical Christian would believe it for a moment. But evangelicals hear testimonies like this all the time. They expect testimonies like this,and the more improbable the better. So Carson gives them one. It's clumsy because he's not very kindly at inventing this kind of thing, but that doesn't matter much.
Not all of Carson's deceptions follow this sample. But several of them do. And they were far from unnecessary. Carson needed to sell his account to evangelicals, and that required a narrative arc as formulaic as any supermarket romance novel. So he gave them one.
Source: motherjones.com