Shots in the Dark

Hours after I wrote that, judging by his behavior at the Waverly Inn last Friday night, Harold Ford was not running for the Senate, Harold Ford announced that he was not running for the Senate.

“I’ve examined this race in every possible way, and I keep returning to the same fundamental conclusion: If I run, the likely result would be a brutal and highly negative Democratic primary — a primary where the winner emerges weakened and the Republican strengthened,” Mr. Ford wrote in an opinion article that was posted on The New York Times Web Site on Monday night and appeared in Tuesday’s issue of the newspaper.

Damn. Sometimes I impress myself.

(Apologies for the self-congratulations. But when you do this for free, you have to get paid somehow.)

A footnote on Ford: He’s right about the primary, of course. What he doesn’t mention is that a) he doesn’t know jack about New York—Ford actually has a Southern accent, which, you know, doesn”t help, b) he hasn’t paid taxes in New York though he’s worked here for three years, and c) he’s made millions from a bank at a time when that’s not exactly the popular thing to do.

Not only would that primary have been ugly, but Ford might very well have lost it.

Because he was seated at the banquette next to the one I was seated in at the Waverly Inn on Friday night, which is a pretty posh placed owned by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, wearing a Yankees cap and having a good old time with his entourage.

First things first, Mr. Ford. The Yankees cap. A), it’s a nice restaurant and you look ridiculous wearing a baseball cap at dinner (this isn’t LA), besides which it’s a fake attempt at inconspicuousness, because who wears a baseball cap at dinner except someone who’s trying not to be seen, so really you’re trying to accomplish the opposite, and b) like you’re a Yankee fan anyway, you’ve only lived in New York for about 20 minutes.

Point two. The Waverly Inn is pretty posh. (Special occasion for me, but even so, I had the $21 hamburger; a friend had the $49 fish.)

If one were running for senator, wouldn’t one want to take a more populist route? Apparently that’s big right now.

And point three, was it just my imagination or were you a little wasted?

I would think this would suggest that Ford isn’t really running for senator. But then, he’s done lots of things that seem, well, counter-intuitive, so I could certainly be wrong…

There was a terrible earthquake over the weekend in Chile, one of the biggest in the last century, with hundreds if not thousands dead and millions of Chileans displaced.

So naturally when I woke up this morning I turned to  Drew Faust’s webpage to see what Harvard would be doing on behalf of those millions. I found several links on her main page to pages on Haiti…but strangely, there was nothing about Chile.

I turned to the Crimson, which had done substantial coverage on Haiti’s tragedy, to see what coverage it granted the Chile catastrophe.

But strangely, its only coverage was a short piece about whether Harvard students studying in Chile were safe. (They are, amen.)

So I checked my inbox. Because Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds had sent me several emails asking me to contribute money to Haiti relief. So naturally I thought…

Strangely, nothing.

Yes, I’m being sarcastic. But I do have a serious point: Harvard, and Drew Faust in particular, need to think harder about when to marshall the university’s resources on behalf of an important cause.

After the Haitian disaster, I wrote a post called “Should Harvard Help Haiti?”

I’m just not sure that it’s the university president’s role to host a web page for Haiti relief—not least because, once you do it for Haiti, where do you stop? New Orleans? Thailand? Appalachia? Darfur? Detroit? Iraq? There are lots of good causes.  You can’t just pick the ones you feel affinity toward. Why should you throw Harvard’s brand behind fundraising for the really, really bad disasters, and not the quite bad ones?

I didn’t expect this question to be put to the test quite so quickly, and I’m sorry it has been. But here we are.

My Haiti post was not well received by most commenters. Pshaw, wrote Standing Eagle. An “Anonymous” wrote, Are you seriously making the claim that Harvard should not fundraise [for Haiti] because it has bigger things to think about?

Someone named Whimsy had the honesty to put it out there: Actually you can just pick the disasters you feel some affinity towards [to help].

Is that what’s going on with Chile—Harvard made a choice?

One of the few supportive comments was, I thought, quite smart, in part because it was less emotional than the negative comments:

…the Harvard reaction has gone far beyond normal caring reactions into something that looks suspiciously like P.R. or self-aggrandizement. Why are we giving extra sick days to people with missing relatives in Haiti, but not to people who lost relatives due to some random event that didn’t end up on the front page? It’s a reaction that’s full of good intentions but largely empty of thought.

“Full of good intentions but largely empty of thought“—I think that’s about right. Certainly there’s no evidence that anyone in the Harvard higher-ups has articulated a guiding philosophy, a principle, for the university in such circumstances.

(I suspect also that Haiti may have a larger constituency at Harvard than Chile does, and that, in some respects, the decision to throw the university’s support—particularly the college’s support— behind efforts to help Haiti was a political one.)

None of this is to suggest that Harvard shouldn’t play a part in trying to make the world a better place. If Drew Faust’s presidency has a theme so far—at least, one of her initiation—it is an attempt to restore a sense of liberal social consciousness to the university’s mission.

One’s instincts are sympathetic to that feel-good course. But it is a trickier endeavor than it at first seems.

If you discourage people from going to Wall Street, as Drew Faust has, are you offending Harvard’s biggest donors?

If you ask Harvard alums to give to Haiti, will they be contributing money that they might otherwise give to Harvard? Or will they feel odd if you ask them for Haiti money but not Chile (or whatever) aid?

And if you involve Harvard from the top down in international tragedy, do you risk getting the university involved in international politics and controversy?

Should a non-profit be asking its donors to contribute to other non-profits?

Where do you draw the line at which tragedies to support and which to, well, not? Do you help Haiti but not Chile because there are more students with Haitian connections at Harvard than there are with Chilean connections? Because there are more professors who study Haiti than who study Chile? Because the death toll in Chile did not cross some arbitrary plateau to reach the point where Chile merits Harvard’s help?

These are not easy questions, but Derek Bok did wrestle with them in his annual presidential letters.

That tradition of publicly thinking about the social role of the university (and other Harvard-related questions) faded under Neil Rudenstine, then disappeared entirely under Larry Summers.

Perhaps it is time for Drew Faust to revive it.

If nothing else, articulating a philosophy for Harvard’s role in national and international relief efforts would give her a good subject for a Commencement address.

…I will be interviewing designer Tommy Hilfiger next Wednesday, March 3rd, as part of the Alliance Francaise series “Fashion Talks.”

Tickets, available through the link above, are a mere $20.

In this video, Wyclef Jean responds to accusations that his charity has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into companies he controls. Or not. You be the judge.

Meanwhile, like the Harvard Foundation, the NAACP is giving Jean an award to honor his fundraising on behalf of Haiti.

Prior to the unfortunate disaster, Yéle Haiti Foundation awarded annual scholarships, started soccer programs for at-risk youth, and facilitated free outdoor films in neighborhoods without electricity.

To be fair, I give the Harvard Foundation the benefit of the doubt that it was unaware of Wyclef Jean’s integrity issues when it picked him as its award recipient, and I gather that informal inquiries were made to check out the allegations. (In my opinion, those inquiries should have been more formal and more persistent.)

Still, Harvard is putting its imprimatur on Jean, and once given this blessing is very hard to revoke. I have no doubt but that there will be more investigation of Yele Haiti, and much skepticism that Wyclef Jean will come out smelling like a rose.

Meanwhile Yele Haiti still remains off Drew Faust’s list of recommended charities….

I am, for some reason, reminded of this scene, featuring Ben Vereen and Roy Scheider, from the classic “All That Jazz.”

Following this blog’s lead—that’s a joke—the NY Post and the NY Daily News both call on David Paterson to resign.

Meanwhile, all three local papers report that Paterson won’t run for reelection.

(Meanwhile, props to local freebie AM New York for best headline: “Lonesome Guv.”)

Paterson should still resign: The incompetence and money-sucking that will occur in the last months of his lame-duck administration will further damage the state.

And in other news about corrupt New York politicians, sleazeball Charlie Rangel was “admonished” by the House ethics committee for taking corporate-sponsored junkets to the Caribbean.

As the Times reports, there are more Gucci loafers to drop.

But the ethics panel, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, did not issue findings in its continuing inquiries into more serious matters concerning Mr. Rangel’s fund-raising, his failure to pay federal taxes on rental income from a Dominican villa, and his use of four rent-stabilized apartments provided by a Manhattan real estate developer.

Like Paterson, Rangel should resign. It’s time to clean this state up.

…’cause the kids are lovin’ it.

The New York Times demonstrates today that David Paterson, New York’s blind governor, is also dumb: He pressured a woman beat up by one of his closest aides not to press charges.

This after his very-public criticism of a sleazeball state senator who beat up his girlfriend.

Which raises many questions, not the least of which is why the aide, 37-year-old David W. Johnson, even works for the governor: He used to sell coke and has on three occasions been involved in “altercations” with women, two of which led to the police being called.

Paterson himself is not exactly a paragon of morality: On assuming Eliot Spitzer’s seat, he promptly confessed to an adulterous affair and there are ubiquitous rumors that he hasn’t kicked the habit.

Paterson’s behavior is hurting the people of a state which really needs good governance right now. He should do the decent thing and resign.

As some of you may have guessed, I’m fascinated by the evolving relationship between humans and animals, particularly when we try to get close to animals, even dangerous ones, on solely human terms. Sometimes that works out well enough; on other occasions the hubris inherent in the act carries deadly consequences.

Two stories in today’s news remind me of that.

The first is the very sad story of a whale trainer—truly a fragile definition—killed by an orca at Sea World in Florida.

Witnesses said the male orca, named Tilikum, grabbed trainer Dawn Brancheau by the waist while she stood on a poolside platform and dragged her into the water.

Killer whales don’t attack humans in the wild, and some whale experts think the animal may have wanted a companion (without realizing that this companion couldn’t breathe underwater) or simply got bored by its absurdly close confinement.

Regardless, the death suggests that killer whales—along with great whites, the animal I’d really not like to be underwater with—probably shouldn’t be held in captivity.

The other article, a terrific piece in the Times, is the heartbreaking story of Connecticut police officer Frank Chiafari, who about a year ago responded to a radio call about a chimp attacking a woman.

The victim, Charla Nash, 56, survived. Her recovery from the attack — the chimp bit and clawed off her face and hands — was presented to the world via an episode of the “Oprah Winfrey Show” in November. She was blind, her features lost in a bulbous and livid pulp.

Chiafari himself was attacked by the chimp, which actually managed to pull open the door of the police car before a stunned Chiafari shot it.

…Officer Chiafari and paramedics, who had been waiting in their vehicles for the chimp to leave, rushed to the body on the ground. “She had no face,” he said. “Her hands are off. There are thumbs and fingers all over the place.” He called out to her. “I feel bad, but I was hoping she wasn’t conscious.”

But Ms. Nash reached out with the stumps of her arms and tried to grab the officer’s leg….

Inevitably, the memories of that day haunt Chiafari.

“I’d go to the mall and see women and imagine them without faces,” he said.

One’s heart goes out to the man, just as it does to the other victim of the chimp’s attack, Ms. Nash.

But again, this didn’t have to happen. Chimps shouldn’t be pets, and they certainly shouldn’t be treated like humans, fed steak and wine and placed on Xanax as Travis was. It’s one thing to screw ourselves up, another to mess up a different species.

Let me relate a little story to help explain where I’m coming from….

When I was about ten, my family took a trip to Bermuda. One day while  there, we visited a dolphin show held in a beautiful little grotto. We arrived late and missed the first half of the show—it was pretty much what you’d imagine, and I loved every second of it—but near the end the dolphin trainer asked if it was anyone’s birthday. Some kid raised his hand, and the trainer sat him in a little rowboat with a towline attached to the bow. One of the dolphins promptly put its nose through the towline, pulled the boat around the grotto, and returned to the dock.

My family stayed for a second show to see what we had missed, and this time, when the trainer asked if it was anyone’s birthday, I thrust my hand up so fast it probably looked like I was trying to catch a line drive off the bat of Derek Jeter. (Not that one would ever want to do that, but you know what I mean.)

Same thing happened: Trainer put me in the boat, dolphin put its nose through the lasso in the rope, and off we went.

Only this time, the dolphin made a semi-circle around the grotto and then took off like a shot for the open ocean.

I, of course, thought that this was about the best thing that had ever happened.

But the trainer was definitely taken aback, and somehow—by slapping the water or something, I don’t remember—he convinced the dolphin to turn around. To my great disappointment.

As a result, I’ve always had a sense of what profound, spiritual joy humans can derive from interactions with animals, even ones where we’ve trained the animal to do something it really oughtn’t to be doing.

But I’ve also had an awareness that, even in the most apparently innocuous  situations, things can go wrong.

For those, like a killer whale “trainer,” who are willing to take the risks, maybe that’s good enough. But as our interactions with animals of many different species grow increasingly intimate, we’re going to have to strive to find a balance—and that will require not just greater understanding of animal natures, but greater respect.

The Tea Baggers are furious with him. Will he fall into line?