Nobody I know is mad at the red Starbucks’ coffee cup, but plenty of people in my world don’t like the media taking on Dr. Ben Carson. Those good folk have a point: Republican candidates get hit by the mainstream media very hard all the time. Clinton gets hit when there is a left-of-Clinton viable alternative. Now that the media knows the limits to the Bern, she is back in her protected bubble.
One Worry Partly Resolved
Some in my world weren’t happy about my questions regarding Dr. Carson’s autobiography as a result. I still have those questions, but in one case there is some support for an undergirding “truth” to a story in Dr. Caron’s autobiography. Evidently, Dr. Carson was pranked regarding a psychology exam and at least one contemporary remembers this prank.
The story in his autobiography has a foundation in an actual event. He did take a fake exam and he did get a cash prize.
I am glad that the story is not made up out of whole cloth, but caution is in order. The story as Dr. Carson told it is essentially false. There was a fake exam, he did take it, and he was given a cash prize by the fakers. However, it was not a test of his honesty in a real class at Yale. The point of the story in the book was how God helped the young Ben Carson and his honesty was vindicated in his psychology class . . . not how the young Carson got tricked and still got a treat of ten dollars.
He took the sort of amusing (and slightly) embarrassing moment that happens to many of us and turned it into a morality tale: God, Dr. Carson, and Yale.
Read the highly detailed story in his authorized autobiography and you will discover that almost every detail in the story is false. Memory gets hazy and we all forget things, but this is a dramatic story with many details and almost everyone of them is wrong. Carson uses the story to end a chapter on his junior year and shortage of money, but the story (if it happened) was his freshman year. The story gives a course name and a number that were not real. The room did not have 150 students, or anything like 150 students and it wasn’t a class (which Carson would have known at the end of the joke). Carson wasn’t given money for his honesty, but for being a good sport by a “fake proctor” not a professor.
Carson now says his ghost made things up (the course number, name) to pad out his story where his memory got hazy. Sadly for those of us who like the good Doctor, the ghost also changed the entire meaning of the event or Dr. Carson transformed a humiliation into a vindication of his honesty. How often is this done in the book? We do not know.
Is this enough to sink his campaign? I doubt it in a campaign with Secretary Clinton setting the standards for honesty.
But Enough! The Real Issue is Lying for Product by the CMC
At this point my friends who like Carson are irritated: what about Obama’s biography? It too is a stew of errors and half-truths, though at least he wrote it. One good reason to oppose Senator Obama at the time was his cavalier approach to the truth and his limited accomplishment. Safe to say, at the same age, Dr. Carson had done more than the young aspiring Senator Obama.
At this point, we can all decide what we think about Dr. Carson, his role with Mannatech, his role in the pro-life debacle in Maryland, and his autobiography. A person I admire pointed out that Dr. Carson has been a role model for so long, surrounded by admirers for years, and that it might be easy to let the years turn an embarrassment into vindication . . . and he did get ten dollars.
Against someone with Clinton’s lack of truth telling, Carson is going to be fine if this is the end of it, but let’s look at what this tells us about the Evangelical Christian Media Complex (CMC). The Christian Media Complex is the group that produces Christian product or “faith based” product by building up celebrities or “brands.”
They are selling you books where the author and the ghost make up important details to improve the story and pad the memory. Dr. Carson was such a brand and they did him no favors as we are discovering.
I don’t blame Dr. Carson as much as the culture of the CMC that took a fine man, a doctor and a hero, and plunged him into a world of dubious ethics.
If you believed that in two different years, God gave Carson a gift of ten dollars building up to his senior year, maybe, maybe not. If you think that God vindicated the honesty of his servant Carson, He did not. The entire literary thrust of the story is fiction at best based on a hazy memory of an event that was like the story told.
This is more common that you might think. Books are published where quotes are spurious and can easily be shown to be spurious. Some ghostwriters get no credit for years of work and Evangelical CMC celebrities are viewed as public intellectuals when they have not read the books they use in “their work.” These “intellectuals” could not defend their own arguments because they are the arguments of the underpaid “researchers.” People claim doctorates and degrees they did not earn or that came in highly questionable ways. Name dropping and trading in endorsements happens.
Realize that to defend his Presidential campaign from bigger charges of dishonesty Dr. Carson is now admitting his book contains details that are made up . . . and remember there was no call to include the details at the time! The Christian Media Complex told you lies to make the story better.
Somebody felt the need to pad Dr. Carson’s story and make it better.
Imagine.
What do you think they have done with lesser men?
The time has come to clean up our own house. American celebrity culture is rotten, let’s not imitate in the church. Here are three places to start:
1. No ghostwriters and ghost thinkers: If a book is not by the subject, let’s call it what it is . . . an authorized biography not an autobiography. If the book isn’t about a person, but a work of fiction or ideas, the author should be the person who wrote the prose and had the ideas.
2. No book tours disguised as sermons. If the tour is set up to sell a book, get a store to host. Our churches’ Sunday homily isn’t a place to move product.
3. Don’t lie. If you don’t know, cannot verify it, then don’t publish it. Don’t invent credentials. Don’t puff accomplishments. (I taught at UC Berkeley, when I spoke at UC Berkeley.)
Everyone makes mistakes. I have. Everyone forgets. I certainly have. Let’s make sure our standards are higher than the secular society and end the Christian Media Complex. I believe God was with Carson at Yale . . . but other spirits may have hindered his quest
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