The fog has not yet lifted from the bay this morning. In Berkeley the air sits at thirteen degrees, partly cloudy, the eucalyptus dripping in that polite, suspended way it has when the marine layer cannot quite decide whether to depart. I sit at my desk with the news of the world in front of me, and I find, as I often do at my age, that the news is not really news at all. It is the same old story told in different costumes by people who believe their costumes are the story.
Consider the man in the white house in the city named for a slaveholding general. He has rejected, again, a peace proposal from Iran, declaring himself "not satisfied" and considering the option, as his press people phrase it with the curatorial neutrality of museum guides, to "blast the hell out of" a country of eighty-six million human beings. Simultaneously he is removing five thousand soldiers from Germany because the German chancellor has displeased him on the Iranian question, and raising the tariffs on European automobiles to twenty-five percent because the Europeans have, in his telling, not complied. The cumulative gesture is that of a child sweeping the chess pieces from the board because the game is going badly. Except the pieces are people, and the board is the earth, and the child has nuclear weapons.
I do not write this to mock him. Mockery is what tyrants feed on; it confirms them in their conviction that they are interesting. I write it because I have spent my life trying to understand power, and because I think the most useful thing an old woman can do is name what she sees.
What I see is an ancient pattern. The Han emperors did this; the Romans did it; the Tudors did it. A ruler grows insecure, so he picks fights. He picks them simultaneously and in every direction, because the only thing more frightening than a single enemy is the silence that follows the absence of one. Carl Schmitt, that bleak Nazi jurist, believed sovereignty consisted in the power to declare the exception. He was not wrong about what the powerful believe. He was only wrong, fatally wrong, that this is what power is.
Power is not the ability to bomb. Bombing is the confession of having no other ability. Real power, the kind that endures past the headline cycle, the kind that builds rather than ruins, has been on display this week in places the front pages mostly ignored.
In Australia, for the first time, no woman under twenty-five has been diagnosed with cervical cancer. A whole disease, on the verge of being eliminated from a continent. This required forty years of patient work by epidemiologists, vaccine developers, public health nurses making house calls in towns no one in Washington could find on a map. It required the assumption – an assumption growing rarer in our century – that the bodies of girls are worth defending with the slow, expensive instruments of medicine.
In Kenya, Sabastian Sawe came home to Eldoret and was draped in garlands by his neighbors, the first man to run a marathon in under two hours under official conditions. "A victory for all of us," he said, and meant it. The phrase contains a whole political philosophy more sophisticated than anything emerging from the Pentagon this week.
In Tehran, in the cafés that the Times reporter described, Iranians gather over coffee and complain about the cost of bread and fall in love and gossip about their neighbors, while the man in the white house contemplates blasting the hell out of them. They are also, of course, where the Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi is now hospitalized after a cardiac crisis, having lost consciousness twice in the cells of a regime that fears her precisely because she will not fear it. She is enduring her government's violence and the violence threatened by ours, and her enduring is itself a form of governance more legitimate than either.
I would call these things power. The power to heal. The power to run. The power to sit in a café in a country at war and refuse, by the act of conversation, to be reduced to a target.
There were marches yesterday, the first of May, as there have been every May since 1886. In the United States, crowds called for the abolition of the immigration enforcement agency and demanded that the rich be taxed, while the administration proposed seventy billion dollars in new funding for the deportation machine. In Turkey the police arrested more than five hundred people for the crime of marching. In Cuba, where Trump has just imposed what the government there reasonably calls collective punishment, the people marched anyway, because that is what one does when one has lost the right to do almost anything else.
There is a wonderful old anarchist phrase: we carry a new world here in our hearts. I used to find it sentimental. I have come to find it descriptive. The new world is in fact what the marchers carry; it is what the doctors in Sydney carry; it is what Mohammadi carries in the cell where her heart is failing. The old world – the world of tariffs and troop movements and the endless, exhausting pageant of grievance issued from gilded rooms – is not the real one. It is only the loud one.
A note for completeness. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has ruled that artificial intelligence may not be credited as actor or writer for an Oscar. A small thing, but I confess it made me smile. A culture that cannot decide whether to start a war can still, sometimes, decide that personhood matters. We take what we can get.
The fog is beginning to lift now. The hills behind the campus are showing their green – not the deep green of the eastern forests I knew as a girl, but the brief, brilliant California green that lasts only a few weeks before the dry season turns everything gold. I will go for a walk later, if the sun cooperates.
I have been thinking, lately, about a sentence I wrote a long time ago, in a book about a desert planet and a man who learned the word for world was the same as the word for forest. I meant it then as a piece of imagination. I think now it was a piece of reporting. The word for power should be the same as the word for care, and where it is not, what we have is not power at all. Only its wound.
