One of the big political stories in the Presidential horse race late this week has been Ben Carson’s “pyramids as grain storage” theory. To review:

“My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain,” Carson said in a 1998 commencement speech at Andrews University, unearthed by BuzzFeed. “Now all the archaeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big — when you stop and think about it, and I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time — to store that much grain.”

Now, anyone who went to elementary school for ten minutes (even in the kind of educational system Ben Carson and his ilk would create if they had their druthers) know this is completely ridiculous. Carson, despite being, by reputation, a gifted neurosurgeon, professes to actually believe this, and it’s hardly the first time Dr. Carson has held forth on bizarre theories with no actual basis in science.

Now, a reasonable person might postulate here that Dr. Carson, coming from a highly specialized field like pediatric neurosurgery, was forced by vocation to focus on a very narrow area of knowledge rather than a broader understanding of a wide variety of fields (almost certainly excluding Egyptology); and might also consider the possibility that surgeons, whose specialized knowledge gives them perceived power over life and death, and whose chosen vocation is commonly considered the epitome of difficulty and complexity, (matched only, perhaps by rocket science), might allow this practically and sociologically reinforced sense of superiority to bleed into other areas where it might not apply so aptly…

Me, I’m personally convinced that Ben Carson is actually just pulling a series of Calvin’s Dad gags on the American public.

At least that’s what I want to believe, because I don’t want to believe that someone so obviously out of touch with general knowledge and understanding of the world could be considered a Presidential frontrunner.