Let’s Get Past The “Bearded Marxist” Thing

  Okay, the other night in the debate between Republican Christine O’Donnell and Democrat Chris Coons, candidates for the U.S. Senate seat from the state of Delaware, the subject came up about an article that Mr. Coons wrote in college.

  The title of the article was, “Chris Coons: The Making Of A Bearded Marxist”. In the article Mr. Coons explains how after a trip to Kenya, upon his return his conservative friends accused him of becoming a “Bearded Marxist”. Much has been made of this phrase, some have said that it is a self description. But within the context of the article, it is clearly Mr. Coons’ friends that are calling him this. Mr. Coons in the debate down played the article as a college joke, and encouraged everyone to take five minutes to read the article. ( I will give a link at the end of this post)

  So if we look past the “Bearded Marxist” part of the article, what are we left to believe about Mr. Coons’ point within the article. First let me say that I do not sense the humor of the piece, but maybe I am just not that smart.

  So, in the opening paragraph Mr. Coons says:

   ” College is supposed to be a time of change, a time to question our assumptions about the world and define our basic values. For me the transformation of the last few years has been especially acute.”

  It would seem as if Mr. Coons saw his time in college as the time when his lifetime basic values would be “DEFINED” and that he felt that he had been transformed.

  He goes on to tell the readers that he had come from a fairly conservative background and that he had campaigned for Reagan. This can only mean that his transformation was into a liberal. He then goes on to explain the cause of that transformation while at Amherst.

  ” I spent spring of my Junior year in Africa on the St. Lawrence Kenya Study Program. “  He continues: “ Certainly Kenya provided a needed catalyst; I saw their poverty and oppression more naked than any in America, and I studied under a bright and eloquent Marxist Professor at the University of Nairobi. Nevertheless, it is all too easy to return from Africa glad to be American and smugly thankful for our wealth and freedom. Instead, Amherst had taught me to question, so in return I questioned  Amherst and America.”

 So it would seem that after experiencing the poverty and oppression of Kenya, instead of “SMUGLY” being thankful for the freedoms of America, Mr. Coons decided that he should transform into something more like a bright and  eloquent Marxist Professor. It is clear that Mr. Coons was very moved by what he witnessed in Kenya and the Marxist Professor must have had a meaningful effect upon him.

  Let’s take a moment to look at the Kenya that Mr. Coons experienced. Kenya at the time when Mr. Coons visited it had been a nation with only one political party, the KANU party, since its independence from Britain in 1963. It had actually outlawed all other parties in 1982 just before young Mr. Coons’ visit. The country had only known one president for its first fifteen years, Jomo Kenyatta. Who died in office in 1978.

  Mr. Coons came back from his trip to this one party state that was desperately poor, that had basically been run under a dictator, and what was his instinct? To question the success and wealth of his own nation that had been having free and open elections that had led to the non-violent exchange of power between opposing political parties, since its independence. This in my view shows a basic, deep-seated hatred of America. How does someone witness the results of a system such as Kenya’s at that time, and twist that into justification for questioning the Liberty and success of  America?

 Well let us look to Mr. Coons’ article: ” Some of the “LEFTIST” that I met early on, were terrifyingly persuasive”

  “More importantly , during sophomore year, several Professors challenged the basic assumptions about America and world relations with which I had grown up.”

  “In examining the role of myths in “primitive” cultures, we also studied the myth of equal opportunity in this country, a myth  I had never questioned.”

  ” A course on the Vietnam War painted in gory detail a picture of the horrible failures made possible by American hubris and dogmatism.”

  ” I came to suspect through these and other courses, that the ideal of America “as a beacon of freedom and justice, providing hope for the world” was not exactly based on reality.”

So it would seem that Mr. Coons’ college experience and his trip to Kenya had filled him with a, hate America first attitude.I also have to believe that there was some part of Mr. Coons’s make-up that made him susceptible to the ”LEFTIST” in his life. When reading the entire article,in my opinion, it becomes clear he was actively seeking a reason to criticize America. 

 The rest of the article revolves around Mr. Coons comparing the ruling class of Kenya to the people of America whom he describes as the “elite”. He has the audacity to compare people in the USA who have been successful through hard work, to a ruling political class in a third world country. This if nothing else demonstrates that Mr. Coons is clearly a believer in socialist ideals. That he believe that those who have been successful, have done so only at the expense of those less fortunate. And that it is the role of government to step in and balance the scale . That for anyone to have anything, they must have taken it from someone else. And that government is the only arbiter that can level the playing field.

 I encourage everyone to read this article before voting for the next Senator from Delaware on November 2nd. I think that it is a clear insight into who Mr. Coons truly is, according to his own definition of his, transformational college experience.

  http://s3.mediamatters.org/static/images/item/20100920-coonsamherst.pdf

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