UFOs, Granaries in Egypt, Egyptian Burial Chambers in Minneapolis and Texas, and the Season for Politics

Maybe Leo Durocher did not exactly say that "Nice guys finish last!"  Maybe he only said that nice guys finish seventh.  He did not believe that being a nice guy necessarily won pennants.

Ben Carson is a nice guy.  Everybody says so.  He doesn't get ruffled.  Excited.  Bothered.  And he is leading the race for the GOP nomination from Iowa.

Dr. Carson, a surgeon, does have some unusual ideas.  For instance, he thinks that, compared to being a brain surgeon, being President of the United States is something easy to do.  An amateur at the job--that is to say, someone with no political experience--could be President, but not a brain surgeon.  He is at least half-right about that.  And he is at least half-wrong about that.

Almost all Presidents have had significant political experience.   Grover Cleveland might be the best example of one who did not, although he was the Mayor of Buffalo, New York, for less than a year.  George W. Bush ran for a seat in Congress, but lost, and he was Governor of Texas, which is a peculiar governorship, in that Texas governors are kept hobbled, on purpose, legally, lest they become significant.  So one might forgive a shred of doubt about amateur brain surgery and politicians.

It might be that Dr. Carson is just suggesting that he might make a fine President, even though he has never learned much about politics, served a high political office or, as several of our Presidents, held a high military post, as Dwight David Eisenhower did, for instance, commanding the European Theater of Operations during World War II.

No one has suggested that Dr. Carson is not a very competent surgeon, indeed!  But he does have some strange ideas.  For instance, as evidence for his belief that private enterprise is superior to governmental control, he cited the evidence provided by comparing Noah's ark, and the Titanic.  Actually, the Titanic was built by Harland and Wolff, shipbuilders for the White Star Line, in Belfast.  It sank.  And Noah built his mythological Ark under the direct supervision of God, who gave detailed instructions.

It is hard to find public vs. private in that comparison.

Recently, Candidate Carson said that it was his personal belief that young Joseph, of Old Testament fame, built the Egyptian pyramids as places to store the grain he said would be needed during periods of want.  I used to live in the Midwest, and drove by granaries nearly every day.  I suppose that it would be foolish of me to suggest that those granaries were really burial chambers built for Egyptian kings, but perhaps if I suggested that it was "just my personal belief", you might let it go as a form of harmless insanity.

And it might be that the Affordable Care Act, our current health car system, somehow interfered with Dr. Carson's cash flow, or disrupted his belief that something like tithing would make a great way to fund government, but it does seem a tad extreme to say, as Dr. Carson did, that the ACA is "the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery".

I asked Mari about that, who recently spent almost a week in the hospital with a really bad gall bladder, and she says she almost agrees with Dr. Carson, except that it was not the health care system that really irritated her, but some of the hired help.  And her gall bladder.

Dr. Carson is a genial man, and he has a religious point of view that scorns what scientists all say about things like the pyramids, which are really granaries, and things like that, but after all, he is a candidate for the Iowa Republican nomination to the Presidency, and it may be that Iowans over on that edge of things like what they hear about storing grain, and Young Joseph the Pyramid Builder, and the Ark, and the Ark of the Covenant, and the Great Flood that rose up along the Missouri, and the headwaters of the Mississippi, and down the mighty Jordan River, that flooded the whole earth as a lesson to non-tithing sinners everywhere.

And Iowans may believe that the Titanic--a symbol of Big-Government-If-Ever-There-Was-One--built by Harland and Wolff, sank, and the Ark didn't.   That should prove something, shouldn't it?  The Ark came gently to rest on a mountain ridge somewhere in Turkey, probably, without a dent or dry rot.  Scientists can't find it, of course, but scientists say the Pharaohs built the pyramids too, don't they?  What do they know?  Fact finders, the whole lot of them!

Unless, of course, the pyramids were built by space aliens with laser stone cutters and anti-gravity, remote-controlled, cargo space crane drones.

No!  Space aliens would have run for political office, imposed a tithe, and discouraged union labor and a minimum wage.