#59.4 | "On power" [FICTION]
A grim realization ~ A rarified club ~ Eight billion monkeys ~ On power
Note: The following is a work of fiction and not necessarily representative of my own personal views. On January 8, I committed to writing a serialized fiction novel, 500-words-a-day for the next thirty days. Every day, I sit down and write 500 divinely inspired words as the story unfolds in my head. Please don’t send me angry DMs or comments; I’m just a conduit for the Universe! Enjoy!! 🎉
IV. A grim realization
That meeting with American Jon Hofstadter from State had been six months ago at the Adlon. Since then, Martin had returned to Copenhagen and worked day and night around the clock with his staff at ministry to put together an acceptable alternative that’d appease the Americans. But every counterproposal they’d sent over to Washington had been simply ignored, not even dignified with a response. It was during those six months that Martin slowly and grimly realized: everything was fake. International law was fake. Treaties were fake. Nothing meant anything unless the people in power believed they did. And it’d rapidly become increasingly clear that the current American administration simply believed whatever they wished. This was an administration that was wholly and abundantly unburdened with what had been.
When their Eurostar pulls into Gare du Nord, Martin disembarks and his lovely wife and two young daughters are already there on the platform waiting for him. Anna, Hanne, and Mette are the loves of his life and he’d lay down in traffic for any of them. He’s known Anna for nearly two decades now, dating back to their college days at Aarhus together. At 37, she’s still gorgeous with her brown hair, blue eyes, and high cheekbones. Mette and Hanne are five and seven years old, each dressed in matching tailored overcoats beside her. For a brief moment, as Martin is stepping off the train, he sees Anna in the late autumn light and falls in love all over again. There’s a unique feeling that only husbands and fathers know: a special kind of pride that swells the human heart. The idea that another person on earth willingly chose you out of the eight other billion monkeys that roam the planet, and entrusted you to be the father of her children. The treaty signing Greenland over to the US will happen over the next three days (the American President having made crystal clear he’d accept no less ceremony) and so Anna would be taking the girls to Disneyland Paris (an atrocious establishment, in Martin’s opinion, and yet another indictment of just how far Europe had fallen) while he and his people ironed out any and all last-minute details of the summit. Finally on the third day, the deed would be done, the handover of Greenland complete.
When Martin had joined the civil service right out of university, he’d believed back then in international order— the idea that the world was well-defined and governed by a system that no matter how imperfect, at least bent towards justice. But as Hofstadter had, gleefully, always loved to point out to him in their various rendezvouses the world over: actual history told a wholly opposite story: Bosnia in ‘92, Kosovo in ‘99, and Crimea in ‘14. All demonstrated to Martin that in the end, power is singularly and unequivocally what matters most. In Bosnia, UN Peacekeepers had declared Srebrenica a “safe area” only for 8,000 Muslim men and boys to be brutally massacred there. In Kosovo, NATO intervened without UN Security Council authorization. And in 2014, Russia simply took Crimea and… nothing happened.
In the end, it is not knowledge nor relations nor treaties nor alliances that govern power. In the end, only power is power.
For a brief moment, as Martin is stepping off the train, he sees Anna in the late autumn light and falls in love all over again. There’s a unique feeling that only husbands and fathers know: a special kind of pride that swells the human heart. The idea that another person on earth willingly chose you out of the eight other billion monkeys that roam the planet, and entrusted you to be the father of her children.