Prairie Lights: Brain surgeon stands up to Egyptologists

I see where all the pointy-headed commentators are making fun of Dr. Ben Carson, the Republican presidential candidate, for asserting that the ancient Egyptian pyramids were built by Joseph, last name unknown.

Carson, citing references in the Bible, has said that Joseph, known for his coat of multiple hues, built the pyramids to store grain. The pointy-heads say this can’t be true because there are something like 130 pyramids, built over a period of at least 1,000 years.

Critics say that unless this Joseph fellow was older than Methuselah and a builder of even more determination than Donald Trump, another Republican presidential candidate, he could not possibly have built that many pyramids in his lifetime.

The Bible tells us that Joseph died at the age of 110, pretty impressive but well short of 1,000 years. But let’s not forget two things: Dr. Ben Carson is a renowned brain surgeon, the first surgeon to have separated conjoined Siamese cats. A guy like that, he’s smarter than hell, and he’s not going to say something unless he knows it is true.

Second, how do we know the pyramids were built over a period of at least 1,000 years? You guessed it, by applying the same highly questionable “science” that tells us the Earth is more than 4 billion years old. Carson believes (as do approximately four in 10 of his fellow Americans) that God created the Earth less than 10,000 years ago.

Again, a guy who operates on brains is not going to believe something that is patently untrue. And if “traditional” scientists are that wrong about the age of the Earth, missing that boat by just a hair under 4 billion years, it is entirely possible that all the pyramids were built in, say, a week or two.

I can picture Joseph, dressed in his very colorful coat, standing on a tall scaffolding and addressing the legions of dedicated pyramid-builders with a bullhorn, which in those days would have been an enormous conch shell. I imagine him encouraging their labors with Trump-like enthusiasm, assuring them that the desire to erect a very tall structure is not an attempt to make up for any anatomical shortcomings.

Why can’t people just accept a simple explanation from an obviously very smart person, a doctor person no less? Ditto with other things Carson has said, because now the media creeps are jumping all over other statements of his.

I spent a long career around media creeps, and I will tell you I never met one who I would have trusted to open my noggin with a surgical saw. One media creep opened my cranium with a beer bottle once, but it was mostly an accident and I’m saving the details for my memoirs.

Which brings me back to Carson, who said in his memoirs that he was once offered a “full scholarship” to West Point and that as a boy he tried to stab an acquaintance with a knife but fortunately only hit the young chap’s belt buckle, allowing him (Carson) to repent and become the calm, very nearly comatose person he is today.

The media creeps are saying there was no scholarship offer and there was no near-victim of a stabbing, nor even a knife or a belt buckle. This is what happens nowadays to a hero like Carson who dares to stand up to the Egyptologists of the world and say, “Hogwash!”

The evolutionary biologists, the geologists and that whole clannish group of die-hard “ancient-Earth” believers, they might cut you some slack. But the Egyptologists, man, they’re street-fighters and you don’t piss them off. Unless you are Dr. Ben Carson.

So ask yourself, who do you want in the White House? Some namby-pamby who’s going to back down when Russian strongman Putin says unequivocally that the pyramids were built during successive dynasties as the resting place of the Egyptian rulers known as pharaohs, a word that nine in 10 Americans can’t spell without looking it up, including me?

Or do you want a president who looks Putin square in the eye and says, “They were grain silos, and they were built by Joe”?

That kind of resolve, that kind of steely determination to stand by facts that look like stupendously wrongheaded opinions, that’s what foreign leaders admire. Putin is on record as saying the Eiffel Tower was built by Napoleon working alone with nothing but a foot-pump welding torch, and not a single soul has had the guts to call bullshit on that.

So enough with the name-calling and cherry-picking of quotes. Until somebody smarter than Dr. Carson enters the presidential race, I’m with him. And Joe.

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