Mean-spirited comments are common. We vent. Sometimes we vent with reasons unknown to others. In one now notable episode of venting, a side story became a rather widespread news story. The story centers on a particularly mean comment on the death of Queen Elizabeth by Carnegie Mellon Associate Professor Uju Anya, Twitter took down her words, but not before her tweat attracted the attention of others, including Jeff Bezos, who took them up as a point of departure to criticize her.


Professor Anya wrote, "I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,”


In reply, Jeff Bezos wrote, "This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don't think so. Wow!”


And the University wrote, “We do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account. Free expression is core to the mission of higher education, however, the views she shard absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster.”


In a followup, Anya wrote, “If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star.” And, not shy about expressing the her feelings, she also wrote with regard to Bezos,“Otoro gba gbue gi” which means “May you rot by your putrid bowels and die from uncontrollable diarrhea.”


Anya’s anger is a private matter, of course. Only she can know the depth and the true origin of her feelings. Her comment that the British government “massacred and displaced half my family” might be rooted in those well-documented nineteenth century conflicts between Britain and various “Nigerian” tribes. But there’s always a potential for irony in human endeavors.


After 1807 and the British abolition of slavery, the Brits sent their navy to stop the slave trade along the West Coast of Africa, the admiralty operating at first out of Fernando Po and sending the people they freed from slavers to Freetown in Sierra Leone. That seeming moral action by the government was followed in 1849 by a rather aggressive takeover of the land now known as Nigeria, which was a source of palm oil. So, the British stopped the slave trade in the region, but then decimated indigenous people in a colonial expansion. Dogooders became dobadders, at least from the perspective of those they fought.


According to an account by Toyin Falola in Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria, one of the flashpoints of violence in the country occurred in 1836 when an English warship stopped four Spanish ships on the Bonny River to free people bound for slavery. * In the short version, the British ship was then captured because the native warlords saw a cessation to their lucrative slave trading—yes, “Nigerians” sold themselves into slavery. The British responded by recapturing their own ship and bombarding those who had captured it. And since the palm oil trade was becoming more important as a replacement for human trafficking, the Colonial power sent more ships and military to secure the region and that trade. Snowballs gathering snow as they roll downhill can’t be found in Nigeria, but the snowball effect occurred in reverse. The British began rolling up the Niger and other rivers gathering more control as they went, invariably at the expense of the native peoples who resisted British expansion. In those skirmishes native Nigerians were killed and displaced. That, regardless of the initial effort to save Africans from slavery, was in itself a morally unjustifiable action.


Without having a conversation with Uju Anya, I believe that those conflicts might have served as the background to her claim about “half my family.” Like so many other of the African diaspora, she resents her history and places the blame on those who enslaved and conquered, and she seems to assume that Queen Elizabeth, a twentieth-century monarch, was somehow responsible. For her role in what her ancestors did, the Queen didn’t apologize, but I believe somewhere along her life’s royal journey, she supposedly acknowledged Britain’s role in colonialism.  I assume, however, that even had she apologized, she would not have ingratiated herself in the heart of Anya. As I wrote above, there’s always a chance of irony in human endeavors. Anya seems to pay little attention to the full history of the land of her birth. That “Nigerians” sold “Nigerians” into slavery was a major cause of human displacement. And pre-colonial “Nigerians” had their own territorial wars that pitted Africans against Africans.


So, if Professor Anya considers Britain a cause of her ancestors’ woes, she seems to have an argument, but she might also have an incomplete sense of history. Africans sold Africans into slavery, so shouldn’t she be railing against Africans? Maybe she knows something about the specifics of her ancestry that the rest of us do not know, maybe something about a specific British action against specific members of her family. That is certainly possible. A little ambivalence might also be justifiable.


Given the protections afforded by the First Amendment, no one needs to show concern over the words of Professor Anya. She’s free to say what she pleases though I might note that if the Queen had been a black person and a white person made Anya’s comments, the flames of hate burning on Twitter would have been a conflagration.


As circumstances are, there is no calming resolution to the war of words when the cause of the war is itself a partial mystery. Anya is free to seethe and to vent. If she could only go back in time to address the perpetrators, things would probably be different. I have a tendency to believe that nineteenth century George III, George IV, William IV, and Victoria were more to blame than twentieth- and twenty-first century Elizabeth. And if the sins of the past are to be carried by grudges in ensuing centuries ad infinitum, then those African slave-traders and warlords avariciously selling their own into slavery should also be subject to mean-spirited messaging. How else should we handle the bitterness?


And handling the full generational bitterness would entail casting aspersions against people of African origin as well as those of European origin. As Kevin Sieff of The Washington Post summarizes (18 Jan 2018), “For over 200 years, powerful kings in what is now the country of Benin captured and sold slaves to Portuguese, French and British merchants. The slaves were usually men, women and children from rival tribes — gagged and jammed into boats bound for Brazil, Haiti and the United States.” **


As I wrote above, Professor Anya is free to harbor her grudge against a privileged white monarch who never officially apologized for nineteenth-century British colonialism. God save the mean. Imagine a world without them, a world in which Israelis and Palestinians would no longer harbor grudges that result in destruction, injury, displacement, and death; without them the Hutus and Tutsis would no longer harbor grudges that result in destruction, injury, displacement, and death; without them the Sunni and the Shia would no longer harbor grudges that result in destruction, injury, displacement, and death; without them every twenty-first century person enslaved by the Soviets would harbor no grudges over their parents’ and grandparents’ twentieth-century imprisonment, displacement, injuries, and deaths, no Chinese would harbor grudges against World War II’s Imperial Japanese, and no descendant of a Holocaust survivor would harbor a grudge against Germans; no…


I think you get the point; The mean continue the meanness. In fact, maybe social media should adopt this version of the English acclamation as a motto: God save the mean.




*Falola, Toyin. 2009. Indiana University Press. Bloomington.


**Online at “An African country reckons with its history of selling slaves.” See also an article by Adobe Tricia Nwaubani in The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2019, entitled “When the Slave Traders Were African.”

The golden calf that so concerned and infuriated Moses was, as all idols seem to be, a distraction from the practical moral system that the prophet offered. Yes, practical—and workable. It appears obvious to me that the Ten Commandments largely set up some rules by which a society can function with the least contention, e.g., avoiding contention with those restrictions on adultery and coveting “thy” neighbor’s wife and the restriction on killing.  In contrast, the golden calf, which might have been a takeoff from Apis or Baal, two bull-like gods the Hebrews knew back in Egypt, seems to have offered no code, no practical, workable way to keep the wheels of society on the chariot’s axel. Yet, to the dismay of Moses, Aaron and the lot worshipped an idol not associated with explicit rules. And it’s not as though Moses’ brother and the Hebrews were unaware of “codes” prior to the prophet’s descending from Mt. Sinai to offer a social contract. Codes had long been a part of society. Hammurabi had laid down a set of rules centuries before the Hebrews left Egypt.


Now of course, all rules are subject over time to reexamination and tweaking according to the times. Generations after the Founding Fathers, American legislatures and courts continue to make minor adjustments to the Constitution that even the Founders saw fit to alter with the Bill of Rights in 1791.


So, tweaking is inherent in living any code because the next generation sees something the previous generation did not see. And the same goes with those Ten Commandments as interpreted by generations millennia removed from their initial proclamation. Take those restrictions on adultery and coveting. What could be so wrong in the minds of many TV characters about a slip, a momentary dalliance? “But Honey, I was lonely at the conference, had a bit too much to drink, and she just took advantage of me. It didn’t mean anything. I still love you.” It’s the mentality encapsulated in the song by Stephen Stills: “When you’re not with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” And as for that restriction on killing that the Sixth Commandment bans, doesn’t it seem rational to allow killing in self defense? “Come on, work with me on this, Judge. What was I supposed to do? He had a knife.”


Codes organize us. Those Ten Commandments have served as controls on inimical behavior—more or less—for many centuries now, even across cultures. If, for example, harming an enemy in war is moral, is there such a thing as excessive harm (short of killing)? The “world” must think so; thus, international tribunals seek justice against perpetrators of “war crimes.” So, codes provide a basis for a justice system, and they do so even a fluidly litigious one that has to respond to quandaries never foreseen by the code makers. In various interpretations of code tweaks, punishments for transgressions also vary: In the US one state might have a death penalty that another state eschews. One jurisdiction might have a liberal parole board compared to a more restrictive board in another jurisdiction. Universal codes always run up against special circumstances that induce urges to tweak, to modify. Even if the code is ostensibly the same (e.g., Thou shall not kill), the interpretation varies.


That means, of course, that having a code is different from applying a code. And that is what we see when politics and justice mesh. In some instances, the unspoken or secret political code allows one group to treat another unjustly while they feign adherence to a “universal” code. Thus, Germans who knew about the treatment of the Jews but said or did nothing to prevent the Holocaust probably adhered to the ostensible moral code that goes back not just to Moses, but also to Hammurabi. The German on the street in 1939 probably would agree that killing violates the “code” but would probably not have been adverse to the starting down that slippery slope to the concentration camps and gas chambers. Little by little, every code slides.


In tweaking a code, those with a particular agenda can see some humans as different and unworthy of protections offered by the code. Morality in practice always seems to be situational, always seems to be convenient and self-serving. The Inquisition’s torturing of heretics and the Puritan’s burning of witches reveal how situational morality can become. Both those Christian authorities of a half millennium ago and those in New England decided that the commandment about killing just didn’t apply in certain circumstances—uniform application be damned, heretics and witches are exceptions; and during World War II, Jews, also.


Shouldn’t we as intelligent beings be able to adjust according to circumstances? Look, for example, how modern technology has altered traditional human interactions. Should we interpret all actions on the basis of an ancient pre-tech code? What of all the variations that tech has introduced, such as enabling people to spread hate or lies through the Web, resulting in some instances in a suicide by a bullied and distraught teenager? And consider the uneven application of the principle of complicity in a crime: Should Hollywood producers and actors be held accountable for crimes that mimic those portrayed in films? Should video game-producers be held accountable for teenagers acting out in imitation of a graphically violent video game? How does that commandment about killing fit into the twenty-first century? The original “Thou shall (shalt) not kill” seems so bare bones, so simplistic, so unrealistic. The logic of the times demands its tweaking.


We apply codes for convenience and control, and our constant tweaking turns clarity into murkiness. The United States has a tradition going back even before Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self Reliance” that individuals are responsible for their actions and are equal under the law. But—tweak—times have changed. Now many argue that society is responsible for individuals’ actions: “How could he have committed murder? you ask. Well, didn’t you know about his upbringing and his neighborhood? What can you expect given those circumstances? He was reared to be a murderer.” Is such an answer about influence not a mitigating factor? “Your Honor, please consider his background.” Thou shalt not kill unless thou were reared to do so—tweak! Thou shalt not kill unless the baby that is almost, but not quite, out of the womb as a partial birth abortion will undo a potential burden on the living—tweak! Thou shalt not commit adultery unless the spouse also strays—tweak! Thou shalt not have false gods except for people like Jim Jones in Guyana or Marshall Applewhite in Rancho Santa Fe—tweak!


Because we are often ambivalent about our moral codes, we are easily influenced by emotions. We adhere to a code according to our social, religious, and political beliefs. Yes, we have been code-makers since Hammurabi, but we have also been tweakers for the same duration. Have a code about border security? So what? Have a code about men using women’s bathrooms? So what? Have a code about women’s sports? So what? We are tweakers, aren’t we? We can change any code on a whim. We can even completely ignore any code as we choose. 

Was Moses just an ancient Marshall Applewhite, getting his code not from a comet like the Heaven's Gate leader, but from some grander celestial source, say a stellar nursery visible in an age before light pollution faded the stars? But then if those ten rules came from a stellar nursery, would they not possibly be like the stars in that nursery, coming into and going out of existence in random fashion, some exploding as supernovae and others merely turning into white and brown dwarfs? And after the eons, would any of those stars look as they did at their births? The Ten Commandments and the US Constitution have wandered through time and space, picking up mass at time by gravitational in-falling and losing mass at other times by outright ejection. Come to think about it, the whole of the Cosmos is in a state of constant tweaking. So, I guess tweaking codes is part of the natural order of entropy.  

Holy cow! There’s really nothing new here, is there?

Every autumnal equinox, I remind myself to revisit Margaret, the child of “Spring and Fall,” the poem in which Gerard Manley Hopkins explains why we cry at the end of movies like Titanic, Philadelphia, and The Fault in Our Stars, and many more that end with the loss of a lead character—Sure, I’ll admit it. *


In “Spring and Fall” Hopkins gives us an image of a small child crying as she sees the leaves turn color and fall, the summer’s green glory of chlorophyll turning to the gold of xanthophyll before succumbing to the crumbling brown of tannic acid. Hopkins tells Margaret she cries not for the dying leaves, but “It is Margaret you mourn for.”


We all die, and we all have some inkling from early on that the growth and death of leaves are yearly analogs of our lives. If you live in a region of deciduous trees, you know that the brilliant fall colors are harbingers of Death. After the yellows, reds (anthocyanin), and oranges (carotene) appear, “Goldengrove” will in a short time “unleave.” Whoever you are and whatever you claim to be will fall like those leaves.


In the greenness of our daily lives, we are much like one another, all of us required to busy ourselves with surviving—though some of us choose to fall prematurely from the tree of life, in my estimation an unfortunate choice. But for those who hang onto the branch, daily surviving can end in vibrancy. Sure, the fall is inevitable; yet, each can strive for a bit of brilliance, a splash of color before we turn brown and return our elemental nature to the soil from which human culture cyclically springs.


Like a fallen brown leaf, you can fertilize not just a single spring bud, but the whole tree of leaves. A good life distributes its nutrients in both known and unknown individuals. A whole generation might share that gift from the past. If you live purposefully, the spectrum of your “unleaving” can be a spectacular reminder that just as dead leaves fertilize next year’s growth, all of us can contribute to the next generation. Turn the green of your now into someone else’s bright green future. You have a single growing season. This is not your practice life.


*Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Spring and Fall”


Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

As a college professor attending seemingly innumerable numbing committee meetings over four decades, I grew accustomed to arguments that hinged not on dispassionate reason, but rather on ad hominem attacks and on interminable restatements as each committee member had to voice a view often voiced by someone earlier in the meeting. Ho-hum. Boring, but telling. Almost always, any personalizing of argument won the day, at least in the minds of self-proclaimed “winners” and their supportive likeminded colleagues. Unfortunately for those who didn’t find themselves aligned with the dominant crowd, depersonalizing arguments to move them into the realm of passionless rationality was an impossible task. In the hallowed halls of academia dispassionate intellectualism is more ideal than real. In the main, there’s a long history of pots calling kettles black. If it’s that way in academia, where hallowed halls encase supposedly the best minds, imagine the personal nature of argument outside the ivy. Yep. Personal. Very personal and very derogatory.


Now, I know that the foregoing is at best general. I have not provided any specific examples, and that even if I had so provided, the claim of cherry-picking anecdotes could be leveled. How could I demonstrate scientifically that my statements are true? Did I somehow categorize the language in all those meetings I attended? Certainly, I didn’t. I made it a habit of getting out as soon as I could, leaving colleagues to haggle sometimes for hours after I left the room. Yet, I am inclined to provide my perspective of a species that labels itself “wise” (sapiens) without exemplifying that character even among the most erudite.


What I found regularly over the course of a four-decade career in academia was that once individuals and groups predetermined their final position, they gave themselves no chance at compromise or alternatives—to say nothing of capitulation. Much of their reticence to acquiesce to logic derived from assaults on their favorite hypotheses and theories. I think, for example, of American geologists scoffing at Alfred Wegener and his “continental drift” hypothesis that has since morphed into plate tectonic theory. Wegener provided objective evidence, but those geologists adhered to the prevailing views.


With regard to the college debates I witnessed over those many years, I will note that invariably, those who cast aspersions or subtle innuendos during debates seemed to be haughty individuals whose self-justification lay in fawning sycophants or in a closed-mindedness that belied their claim to intellectual purity. Don’t get me wrong; I probably also adhere to positions that are tinged with assumption. Fortunately from my perspective, those many meetings led to nothing but reports that found their way into the circular file. Now these many years later, I ask myself whether or not anyone who is still alive can remember the topics discussed or whether in remembering they can recall the nature of the argument.


Here I’d ask you to go back a few lines to see, “If it’s that way in academia, where hallowed halls encase supposedly the best minds, imagine the personal nature of argument outside the ivy.” Well, last night, September 1, 2022, I watched that personalization of argument on national television when the political analog of my experience with university committee debates was on display as the US President condemned Republicans.


Because I know that the last sentence is subject to debate because Democrat pundits praised the President, I will note that the President’s condemnation of Republicans might simply have been the result of his speech writers having gone full Hitler and Goebbels. Republicans, regardless of the self-righteous stand of pundits, and specifically those Republicans who align with the slogan “Make America Great Again” because they favor strong states’ rights and limited federal control, yes, those “MAGA” people, are now  the new “German Jews” who are “enemies of the state.” I suppose I could accept such condemnation if it had been delivered with dispassionate deductive reasoning that provided evidence for the labeling and that didn’t ignore the many Democrat-pased Jim Crow laws. But Biden’s noting that those who question the results of an election were enemies of democracy ignores those months of Floridians counting chads after Al Gore lost, Ohioans recounting votes after John Kerry lost, and Hillary Clinton refusing in books and interviews to accept the legitimacy of her loss. His speech ignores the demonstrable hoax perpetrated on the country by the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and FBI agents that a presidential candidate had “colluded” with Russians.


As I saw in those many committee meetings, so I saw on September 1 the appeal to emotion, the dismissal of history, and the refusal to use specifics instead of generalities. How, I might ask, are the efforts of a few, such as those who invaded the Capitol on January 6, logically ascribed to the many? And how—I suppose this was in his thinking—was the Supreme Court decision to send abortion policy back to the states an anti-democratic attack by those Republicans that Biden had recently called “semi-fascists”? And—Big How, here—how was the assassination attempt of a Supreme Court Justice by a Left-leaning man, not a more serious attack on Democracy? Am I missing the link between states having the right to decide their own nature and fascism and the link between a Court decision and the destruction of democracy?


I don’t want to belabor the problems I found in the divisive speech the President gave because you might have already thought it was inspiring—what with the Marines standing at attention in the background of blood-red bricks. But it was a national speech that provided no information about specific crises—many of which the Administration engendered—other than the President’s fear that an upcoming election might not turn the nation more in his direction.

What was the urgency? Certainly, the President did not address problems that seem to affect Americans personally, such as 1) the high costs of energy, 2) high inflation, 3) threats from foreign powers emboldened by the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that left billions of dollars in military equipment to the Taliban, reestablished a safe haven for Al Qaeda, and deprived all Afghani women of their recently gained education opportunities, 4) some 12 agencies and at least 45 US government agents shutting down the flow of free speech on social media and in the mainstream complicit Press, and 5) the flow of illegal drugs across a border that—regardless of the Administration’s claims—is wide open to human traffickers, illegal immigrants, and drug cartels that have pushed 10,000 pounds of fentanyl into the country just this year, causing tens of thousands of overdoses. Ostensible—at least to me— actual threats to democracy, safety, and prosperity of the United States, those five issues alone warranted a national address, but the President did not address any of them, did not provide solutions. Instead, like some academician in his lab or classroom, the President lectured the American people on the evils of being Republican (I suppose on the evils of having voted against him).


We live, as all our predecessors have lived, in crazy times and in a time of blatant censorship of opposing ideas. There’s little new in the current attack on free speech by opponents to the administration in power. Even Thomas Jefferson subtly condemned the Press for its “lies.” That censorship subtle or overt, which the censored understand and the censoring group fail to recognize troublesome, has made this an era of extreme “Ad Hominemism.” If future Americans look back on this era, they might call it the Age of Pots Condemning Kettles. It’s the ad hominem ad infinitum I saw during those four decades in academia when I longed for dispassionate reason and an end to personalizing debate.