Seventh Day Adventist Church
OCT 21, 2015
Ben Carson’s chilling God complex: The commencement speech I won’t soon forget
The presidential hopeful was the keynote speaker at my white coat ceremony.
Even then, I knew he was dangerous
Retired neurosurgeon and Republican presidential hopeful Dr. Ben Carson is all over the news these days. His recent public comments have ranged from the offensive to the bizarre: from his assertion that he would have tackled the Oregon college gunman to the discovery that he once“bravely redirected” an armed robber he encountered in a Baltimore Popeyes. And how can we forget his infamous comments about how a Muslim shouldn’t be President or how Jews could have stopped the Holocaust had they only been armed? His statements are so increasingly preposterous that it’s hard to distinguish a satirical headline from a real one (like this hilarious Andy Borowitz report, “Ben Carson: Pompeii Victims Should Have Outrun Lava,” which many on social media thought was real).
In the public consciousness, Ben Carson used to be the grape jelly to Donald Trump’s chock-full-of-nutty peanut butter. He was the seemingly mild-mannered straight man to Trump’s loud-mouthed crassness. Yet he’s gone so far off the rails these days as to appear borderline unhinged, certainly out of touch with reality. Ben Carson is, in the words of another genius Andy Borowitz report, single-handedly shattering the stereotype that brain surgeons are smart.
As a physician trained at Johns Hopkins Medical School, I stand with my colleagues who are outraged at Carson’s opinions about Obamacare “as slavery”, abortion “as human sacrifice” and prison as capable of turning “a lot of straight people into gays.”From being a well-respected neurosurgeon on faculty at Johns Hopkins Hospital, known the world over for separating multiple sets of twins joined at the head, Carson has become an embarrassment to the profession of medicine, and should be called out as such. I am dismayed that he’s not been more roundly and publicly criticized by doctors across the country. He’s not just making physicians look stupid, he’s making us look like clueless egomaniacs. Unfortunately, the roots of his cultural tone-deafness can be easily traced to our profession. So I don’t just blame Ben Carson, I blame everyone who helped Ben Carson become Ben Carson. I blame a culture of medicine that not just allows but rewards the unchecked growth of professional egos. I blame a profession that rewards doctors for thinking, and acting, like they are gods.
Back in the day when I was a student and Carson was a professor at Johns Hopkins, he was the keynote speaker at my ‘white coat ceremony’ — the pomp-and circumstance-filled event in which young physicians in training are made to literally and metaphorically feel the weight of their profession upon their shoulders. “You are entering a time honored and ancient profession,” someone intoned at us, while our Dean assured us that as Hopkins med students we were “the best of the best.” Although the ceremony itself was intended to be a humbling experience, the culture of the institution assured that it was laced with plenty of pomposity. And in my first year of medical school, that arrogance wore the face of Dr. Ben Carson.
Forget the Holocaust, forget his opinions on gun control: any physician who is willing to write a memoir called Gifted Hands and speak of himself performing “miracles” needs to be looked on as an out-of-touch megalomaniac. We in the medical field should have all seen this coming. Yet, back in the early 1990’s, not only Ben Carson, but the rest of Johns Hopkins Medical School seemed to buy into the myth of the godly Carson — the King Solomon-like surgeon who ran around separating children like the red sea (Ok, I’m mixing my Biblical metaphors, but you get where I’m going.)
At my white coat ceremony, as I recall, Dr. Carson talked a lot about that near mythical separation of the conjoined twins. To his credit, he also described the challenges of being an African American neurosurgeon, relating stories about patients who mistook him for the cleaning staff. But even in those tales, the undertone of godliness was always there. Finally, Carson told a long-winded and wind-baggy story about being called away to perform emergency surgery the day of his son’s fifth birthday party. That night, on returning home, having missed the cake and gifts, the balloons and singing, Carson apparently woke his small son up and told him, “This year, I didn’t have time to get you a present, son, but this year, for your birthday present” — and here, Carson paused for dramatic effect — “I saved another child’s life!”
No comments:
Post a Comment