DiManno on Carson’s fibs,
My friend Christie Blatchford and I have often joked about writing a co-memoir to be titled: Twisted Sisters: A No-Nothing Tell-All.
Seriously, it would be impossible for me to ever pen a biographical memoir because I couldn’t tell the truth and I wouldn’t lie.
The ruthlessness required to chronicle a life is simply not in my nature.
Also, I can hardly remember a damn thing.
Yet misremembering — which is another term for mendacity — seems scarcely a failing or source of embarrassment for too many individuals who’ve yarned their existence between the covers of a tome.
Playwright Lillian Hellman, in her second volume of memoirs, at least provided an honest clue to the opaque quality of her reminiscences by calling the bestseller Pentimento, a style of painting that refers to layers on canvas, with traces of the earlier image visible beneath. It might have happened this way, Hellman was saying; or maybe not.
Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson appears unable to have distinguished fact from fiction in his biography, Gifted Hands, first published nearly two decades ago but only now being more closely examined for inaccuracies and, well, outright fibbing. On Sunday, Carson mounted an ingenuous defence of his shall-we-say embellishments in an appearance on Face the Nation.
Of course Carson, who’s been surging in opinion polls — there’s just no underestimating the weird proclivities of the American rightleaning public — is all the time offering fresh or half-baked musings of extraordinarily cuckoo content, presumably anchored in his Seventh Day Adventist religious beliefs. Lately, he’s been banging on again about the ancient pyramids, claiming they were built to store grain, not dead pharaohs, despite the well-established documentation of historians and biblical archeologists. Tut-Tut, Ben. But Carson takes a literalist interpretation of scripture, in this case the Book of Genesis, in which Joseph, one of Jacob’s 12 sons, stores enough grain to feed Egypt during seven years of drought.
I do note that even Herodotus — known as the Father of History — fudged the facts when it suited his purpose. In his exhaustive account of the Peloponnesian Wars, Herodotus exaggerated the size of the Persian armies to make the Greeks appear more valiant.
Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, would logically be a man of science. Yet logic goes out the window when it conflicts with undeviating piety.
We can make allowances for faith, I suppose, though it’s alarming to think of Carson’s righteous finger on the nuke button to launch Armageddon. There’s no excuse, however, for the multiple deceptions — misleadings, to be put it kindly — that are now coming to light about Gifted Hands. Naturally, the candidate has characterized it as character assassination by the liberal secular moment and a media which “will go through all lengths trying to discredit me.”
He is, literally, the author of his own Deadspin.
The claim that the teenaged Carson so impressed Gen. William Westmoreland when the two dined together that Carson was subsequently offered a “full scholarship” to West Point (which he didn’t take) turns out to be a big whopper. That assertion has been central to Carson’s personal narrative for years. But Politico, the New York Times and other media organizations have done a thorough job of dismantling that boast. On Friday, Carson conceded he’d never applied nor was granted admission to West Point. Westmoreland, U.S. army records show, was never in Detroit on the day their meeting allegedly occurred. Further, the military academy doesn’t offer a full scholarship as described.
Last week, the Washington Post published a story arising from dozens of interviews with individuals who had been students at Carson’s Detroit high school at the time he says he sheltered white students from harm during race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. None of those former students remembered any such Carson heroics.
Further, no proof has been sourced of an alleged incident from Carson’s purportedly troubled adolescence when he tried to stab a boy in the belly, a key redemptive incident in his come-to-Jesus evolution — he thereafter had a conversation with the Lord (in the bathroom) had put aside violence.
Carson surely can’t be surprised that, as a presidential wannabe, every detail of his life — particular those events he specifically documented — would be vetted by the skeptical eye of media.
Perhaps everybody embellishes — in autobiographies, in professional resumés — to give their lives greater drama, burnished bona fides, an aura of exceptionalism reaching back to salad days, as if they were always destined for grand things. But lies have a way of catching up.
Recall Marilee Jones, the MIT dean who maintained her scholarly ruse for 28 years until finally acknowledging she’d never received either the undergraduate or master’s degree claimed on her resumé. Or Notre Dame football coach George O’Leary, forced to resign for lying about the master’s degree in education he hadn’t received — and the fact he’d never played a single game of football at the University of New Hampshire after claiming three years on the varsity team. British celebrity chef Robert Irvine was fired from his own food show when it was uncovered that he didn’t actually design Kate and William’s wedding cake. You’d figure such biographical forgeries would be easily punctured. So what were they thinking?
Wall Street is full of executives who invented MBAs. And high-profile journalists are no slouches either when it comes to making up stuff — whether about others (the fabricated reportage of a Jayson Blair, for instance) or oneself (NBC anchor Brian Williams’, um, enhanced combat anecdotes).
In aiming for the White House, Carson has invited scrutiny of his bio for the multiple occurrences of not-so-white lies.
Which brings to mind a more fitting title for Gifted Hands, except it’s already taken by Al Franken, satirist-writer-actor and junior senator for Minnesota: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.