Ben Carson should just operate on bodies, not the body politic
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Version 0 of 1. The Republican Party’s disingenuous exploitation of identity politics explains why for the next few months you will see a lot of Dr Ben Carson (and Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio), who yesterday announced his intention to fail to become President of the United States. But let us take a cue from the Republican Party and employ a quote they run out whenever arguing that they don’t dislike minorities for being minorities but just coincidentally dislike almost all of them on their merits. Let us judge Dr Ben Carson not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character. Ben Carson is a mean-spirited loon. This is not to suggest that Ben Carson is an unintelligent man. Far from it! You don’t get to become a Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and successfully separate twins conjoined at the head without mastering a great deal of formidable and specialized knowledge. And indeed his life story is pretty incredible; they made it into a TV movie! Unfortunately, he thinks he can now operate on the body politic, and, sorry, but you can’t do that, man. That’s just a metaphor. You’ve probably seen this kind of bozo impulse at work in your life. A friend or colleague amasses a tremendous amount of knowledge in some arcane or specialized field and mistakenly thinks this proficiency applies to everything. At some point, they forget that it’s possible that they could be uninformed on any issue that interests them and they assume any obstacles encountered are the fault of people who have failed to keep up. Call it stupid-smart if you want, call it Carson’s Neurosis, call it whatever — they’re the same problem. Sure, you say, but how was the announcement? It looked like something arranged by a loon. There was 25 minutes of music preceding the speech, including a gospel choir performing Eminem’s Lose Yourself. Imagine the thought process that went into that. One hopes, on some fundamental level, that somebody actually said out loud: “The thing that’s kept black people from voting Republican is not enough gospel versions of white rap.” We, as an ailing nation, need that to be true. Starting at 15:30, there was also light opera. A five minute video of breathtaking grandiosity followed, with a deep-voiced narrator starting off slowly and gruffly before speeding up into something like a mild ecstasy at the notion of launching Ben Carson into the White House instead of the sun. We are told that “historians will write about this critical turning point for our nation and how we responded to the dynamic forces changing our world”, as Carson is likened via images to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Okay. Next, the voiceover guy tells us: “We can no longer afford the continuing dysfunction of opposing partisan rancor ... We have stifled all civilized and productive debate”. Yo, voiceover guy, I’m really happy for you and I’ma let you finish, but lets read some old Ben Carson quotes: There was the time he said that Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened to this nation since slavery.” There was the time in February of last year that he said that Americans were afraid to speak up against progressives because they were afraid “they will be targeted, they will be called names, they will be investigated by the IRS and all kinds of unimaginable things will happen”. He later repeats this same talking point in his announcement speech. But back then he went on: “There comes a time when people with values simply have to stand up. Think about Nazi Germany. Most of those people did not believe in what Hitler was doing. But did they speak up? Did they stand up for what they believe in? They did not, and you saw what happened.” And if that was just a rhetorical flourish, he clarified a month later when he said that Americans lived in a Gestapo state. I mean, [our society is] very much like Nazi Germany. And I know you’re not supposed to say ‘Nazi Germany,’ but I don’t care about political correctness. You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population ... And it’s because of the PC police, it’s because of politicians, it’s because of news. It’s all of these things are combining to stifle people’s conversation. He goes on to make those same “stifling conversation” points in his announcement speech, but with all the Nazi stuff cut out. Like the de-Nazified Nazi material, much of Carson’s announcement is similar to previous speeches, and frankly his speech just doesn’t pop without Hitler or slaves. Carson has a headset mic and paces the state, trying for the Ted Cruz effect. But Cruz was a star parliamentary debater, and Carson is not. He noticeably searches for his next point and repeats himself, speaking with a heavy-lidded and often downcast visage, as if your tired, exasperated granddad converted a kitchen lecture you didn’t want to hear into a TED talk you want to hear less. Carson states that he doesn’t want to get rid of the safety net. “This is a blatant lie. I have no desire to get rid of safety nets for people who need them. I have a strong desire to get rid of programs that create dependency in able-bodied people”. Translated back from the Republican, that’s: “I want to get rid of the safety net for anyone who isn’t sick”. He then flawlessly attacks a straw man argument about socialism that no Democratic candidate has ever made in history: “they want to be involved in every aspect of [people’s] lives. They want most of their earnings.” He boldly says the word socialism and sarcastically says the word utopia. Minutes later, he laments: “We’ve allowed the purveyors of division to become rampant in our society and to create fiction and fear.” This somehow then segues into the words Saul Alinsky and another straw man about, essentially, thoughtcrime. It gets dumber from there, but it involves math and familiar BS about the highest corporate tax rate in the world, so we’ll skip it. Finally, he says: “We also have a great team. We have — who do we have?” then remembers the names of his campaign advisors and brings them all up onstage after introducing each. We close with them, the gospel choir and the Carsons singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” This is all going to get worse and hopefully much funnier before Carson goes away. Because, while he’s certainly a brilliant medical mind, he seems unaware or unconcerned with all the things he doesn’t know. What he doesn’t know about foreign policy could probably be described as “all of it.” He honestly thinks that the deprivation of heterosexual contact that leads to homosexuality in prison is a good argument for homosexuality being “a choice.” He once stated that “anarchy” could cancel the 2016 election. And you will keep seeing him, not only because he’s polling at 7.3% in Iowa (above Ted Cruz!), but because he’s good for identity politics. It works both in terms of optics (eg “How can the Republican Party not appeal to black people when there’s a black candidate?”), and in terms of a far-right fever dream of Ben Carson as the savior candidate who could peel off Obama voters and guarantee a Republican presidency. All he needs is 17% of the black vote, despite offering no policies that address black people’s needs instead of boilerplate conservative, Christian, pro-business needs. The math is inevitable! Ordinarily, with a candidate this prone to saying things this crazy and with such a steep road ahead, you go to the default answer for why they’re doing this: they’re selling a book, or they’re trying to get a multi-million-dollar annual contract at Fox News, or — if they’re Newt and Callista Gingrich — they’re trying to sell books, children’s books, collectibles, videos, wallpaper patterns and haunted jade figurines. But that’s the interesting thing about a brilliant idiot like Ben Carson. He may, with deep intellectual conviction, have no idea he cannot possibly win. |