by Suzy Hansen
The language reminded me of a tiny book a friend gave me before I left for Istanbul; she had found it in a used bookshop. It was called A Pocket Guide to Turkey, and had been produced by the U.S. Department of Defense for all the soldiers heading to one of their first Cold War satellites, in the early days of the postwar empire. People liked to say of Afghanistan that the occupation failed because we weren’t good at occupations anymore, but I suspect we were always the same way:
Of course Uncle Sam isn’t sending you to Turkey to observe social trends. You have a couple of jobs to do. Your bread-and-butter job is to teach the Turks all you can about American military know-how. That’s plenty important. The Turks wouldn’t have invited you over if they didn’t think it was worth while—if they didn’t feel that you knew your stuff.
The Americans in Kabul brought out a five-by-seven-foot flag made out of cupcakes. I saw a platter of potato skins and, feeling an unexpected rush of nostalgia, grabbed one. Karl Eikenberry thanked “sponsors” for the event. Apparently, local Afghan and foreign businesses had paid for the American embassy’s Fourth of July party.
The embassy band was singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Hassina Syed seemed upbeat. She said this Fourth of July party was better than last year’s.
We shuffled out to wait for our drivers. The cars whipped and halted around a monument to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated two days before September 11. The dust and the noise and the heat—it all felt different out there. Big cement trucks paused in front of the gates. Life felt uncertain. A few of us backed away from the traffic to wait behind a pile of sandbags. I wondered whether the Afghans driving by knew it was our Independence Day.
“Ha,” Arif said, when he picked me up. “We’ve had like four independence days. Independence from the British, independence from the Soviets, independence from the Taliban, and … inshallah, someday, independence from you.”
A few weeks after I left, a truck full of American contractors killed four Afghan civilians on the road, and Afghans torched the cars and screamed “Death to America!” So often walking through Kabul, I wished I’d never come to Afghanistan. It was my mere existence, I felt, that did damage enough. I wanted nothing else but to withdraw myself.
In “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell writes: “All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.” Such were the ugly confessions of the Englishman sent to work for the empire abroad; I suppose there are American soldiers, spies, diplomats, even embassy chefs who might sometimes share the same crisis of conscience and thrill of anger, even if we don’t hear about it much. Mostly, though, we don’t think of ourselves like the British at all. That month, as an American journalist in Kabul, attending embassy parties, and living in homes behind blast walls, and enjoying the privileges of being a white person in Asia, I had a feeling similar to Orwell’s, except for a few key aspects. The dominant reflex was not hatred—the desire to “drive the bayonet,” as Orwell had written—but indifference. In Greece and Turkey, in the 1940s and 1950s, Americans had descended on Athens and Istanbul for their specific nation-building tasks, while their CIA and military counterparts deployed direct imperial muscle, as they would throughout the world and up until this day. But by the 1990s and 2000s, even State Department officials in Afghanistan, or USAID representatives in Egypt, hardly did the dirty, physical work of empire anymore. The long arm of American power allowed for most Americans to remain completely isolated from the foreigners they were in denial of ruling; there would never be any guts to splay with a bayonet. For many of us, there may not even be a bayonet. We would not know them, and therefore, as Baldwin said, could not love them, could not care so much for their deaths. Distance, distance, distance was the American way, a frigid, loveless distance, a kind of power and violence that destroyed intimacy in all its other manifestations, that destroyed empathy in all of its imperial citizens, in us, in me.
But it was darker than this, wasn’t it? We all wanted to hold on to this imperial dream, because the loss of the empire meant we might someday be the ones who were ruled. It meant we would not be the strongest, it meant we would not chart our own course, it meant all the freedoms we believed ourselves divinely ordained for, all the power to “be whatever you want to be”—everything that made up the meaning of our American lives—would be gone. We couldn’t stand it. We couldn’t stand a world in which we might one day be the Afghans. We could not imagine it and so, from Kabul, we never left.
7.
AMERICAN DREAMS: AMERICA, IRAN, AND TURKEY
It was hardly understood that the real fear of Iranians at the time was that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, would simply not allow a political system to develop that didn’t mirror its own.
—HOOMAN MAJD
ONCE, WHILE I WAS VISITING New York, I got pneumonia. Afterward, countless American friends remarked with concern, “Well, thank God you happened to be in America!”—because they had never been to Turkey, or because they knew nothing about the majority of hospitals in the United States of America.
That week, I had been staying at an apartment in Brooklyn, thinking I had the flu. When I felt dizzy one morning, I called a friend to take me to the hospital. We went to the closest one, a charity hospital set amid the projects and directly across the street from a row of magnificent brownstones, most of them some three million dollars each. I almost passed out at the registration desk, but once I got to the emergency room, things really went downhill. A nurse yelled at me for dropping my purse next to my bed “because someone might steal it”; there was no food on offer; at night, adorable but hapless residents stood before a group of students, saying, “Now. This patient’s name is Su-zy Han-sen, but she’s from Turkey. Wow.” Over the first twenty-four hours, a series of doctors on shifts vacillated in their diagnosis of me; first lung cancer, and then “possibly” HIV, and then tuberculosis, at which point I was actually quarantined for forty-eight hours, no last phone calls, no Internet. My glasses got mysteriously thrown out; families of flies lived in the public hallway showers; at night a mentally ill man stood in the middle of the hallway and screamed over and over, “Get. The fuck. Out the way.” The patient next to me cried silently the whole time.
Thank God I happened to be in America.
If I had been in Turkey, I would have gone to a hospital as beautiful and immense as a luxury shopping mall, it would likely have cost far less money than the Brooklyn charity hospital, and my friends’ mothers would have brought me homemade food and pestered the doctors for me every day. That fancy Turkish hospital was available to me, of course, only because of the power of the American dollar in Turkey. But at the height of the health care crisis, most Americans still did not know just how terrifying our hospitals were, and in a way I did thank God I had been in America when I got pneumonia, because that night in the hospital was one of the two times I viscerally understood how degraded America had become for many of its people. The other time was when I came home from Istanbul to spend several months in Mississippi.
At the time, 2012, it was an odd decision to return home to work; most foreign correspondents in Istanbul had begun covering the war in Syria, and the refugees fleeing over the Turkish border, which from the position of Istanbul, and Europe, still seemed very far away. I remembered the refugees I had seen in Greece; so many of them, I knew, had for years gotten to Greece through three major refugee routes that passed through North Africa, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and then Turkey. There, many went to an area in Istanbul nicknamed Somali Stand-Up Street to find a smuggler who would get them to Greece. Istanbul had long been a transit hub, and I had always wanted to write about the refugees. But I had never been to Syria, and I was no expert on the Arab Spring, and I had begun to lose my belief that I was qualified to cover a region I knew little about. So when I read that a black doctor in Mississippi named Dr. Aaro
n Shirley was arguing that Americans should consider adopting a health care system pioneered in Iran, I went home to cover the country I thought I knew.
In the United States then, the financial crisis, to some degree, had prompted self-examination: Occupy Wall Street denounced the One Percent; the concept of gross inequality evolved from a leftist preoccupation to undeniable fact. Soon the French economist Thomas Piketty would question the very nature of capitalism and his book would become a bestseller. But the old American habits returned, too: white people hated the black president, the occupation in Afghanistan continued while the defunct one in Iraq was bearing new terrorist groups, drones detached from human emotion or responsibility continued to seek out their targets in Yemen and Pakistan. Guantánamo Bay was open. Obama’s efforts to reform health care earned him the epithet “Socialist,” and the American conservatives I knew had begun believing the man himself was a conspiracy against the country. Something in America wasn’t working: you could feel it in the dread vibrating in newscasters’ faces, and in the president’s deepening, self-protective cool. But Mississippi wasn’t part of this fast-changing world; in Mississippi, not much had changed at all.
The historian John Dittmer once wrote in his book about the civil rights movement that the state of Mississippi was “the standard by which this nation’s commitment to social justice would be measured.” He wrote that in a book about a time when words like “social justice” were used more frequently, when the United States, both at home and abroad, still aspired to fulfill the myths of its perfect modernity, when the Turks still told American visitors they loved America. John Dittmer said that Mississippi would be the standard by which Americans’ commitment to social justice would be measured in a book about a bloody but hopeful time.
It was then, too, that James Baldwin debated William F. Buckley at Cambridge. The topic of the 1965 debate was: “Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?” In 2009, when I watched it, I wondered whether a related question couldn’t still be asked: Was the American dream at the expense of the world? “From a very literal point of view,” Baldwin says in the beautiful, grainy video; he is small in stature, and proud, and surrounded by admiring British boys, while William F. Buckley looks on with his nose pointed to heaven. “The harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country—the economy, especially in the South—could not conceivably be what they are if it had not been, and this is still so, for cheap labor.”
His voice became stronger. “I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked the cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else’s whip—for nothing. For nothing.”
In that spirit, did it not mean that as a white American, I ran the plantations, and I owned the slaves, and I lashed the whip—for everything? For everything?
Dittmer’s concept of “social justice,” Baldwin’s beautiful accusation—these statements, questions, and assumptions seemed comparatively so innocent, language from a time swept away long ago. To go to Mississippi and to read about the civil rights movement again—to speak to people who still carried with them the language and spirit of that time, no matter how downtrodden they felt—was to realize that those violent years had actually been more progressive than our own. When I went to Mississippi, it was clear not only that the United States’ standard of commitment to social justice had declined, but that the larger forces of political corruption, economic decline, and indifference had made it impossible for social justice to exist. As the author Ta-Nehisi Coates would write some years later, back then African Americans aspired to the dream, but today they know that it was built on their backs.
Dr. Aaron Shirley’s belief that Americans needed to look to Iran to solve their health care crisis wasn’t meant to be some heartwarming act of innovative international diplomacy. His plan—which never went very far—was, like Coates’s pessimism, a middle finger to the system, an acknowledgment of hopelessness. But most remarkable to my eyes was that Dr. Shirley’s idea reversed the logic of American modernization theory: here was the United States asking a so-called developing country for help, and not any third-world country, but Iran, the country that spurned America’s destructive embrace with the greatest and most lasting force.
* * *
DR. SHIRLEY was a rabble-rouser, an old civil rights–era hero who for a long time was the only black pediatrician to see black patients in Mississippi, the type of activist who, in the 1960s, wasn’t necessarily of the “nonviolent persuasion.” At that time, black people were killed and houses were bombed regularly, and policemen were the ones doing the killing and the bombing. Upon hearing that the local KKK was headed to his home to kill him, Dr. Shirley would warn the police department that each of his four children knew how to shoot and all of them were ready.
Dr. Shirley was the first black doctor to do his residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. For a decade, he worked at the Delta Health Center in Mound Bayou, which was one of the only hospitals in Mississippi where black people could go. He was trailed by the State Sovereignty Commission, which began spying on black people shortly after Brown v. Board of Education, and in 1964 he went to Atlantic City with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the Democratic Party to recognize black candidates. He did things that don’t end up in history books, too, such as build wells for poor black people when they didn’t have clean drinking water; travel throughout rural areas to treat malnourished babies; fight for federally qualified health centers and welfare rights and Medicaid. He was, by all accounts, a take-no-shit kind of guy. “When Aaron was doing his residency, he was the only black resident, and one day a black soldier came in with a head injury,” said Dr. Jack Geiger, who worked with Shirley. “He was sitting in a back room, and the doctor’s attitude was ‘Oh, just another drunk nigger,’ you know, we’ll just leave him back there. Well, Aaron heard this and walked right out and called the Pentagon. And soon enough there was a general or a colonel or whatever he was standing in the emergency room, demanding to know what was going on with his soldier. That’s Aaron.”
When I visited him, Dr. Shirley was working at the Jackson Medical Mall, his name emblazoned on a wall inside the building. For decades, the Mall was an actual mall, with a JCPenney and a Gayfers, but the mall and the area around it began to depreciate as whites fled integration for whiter, suburban areas such as Brandon and Madison and Pearl. Historic downtown Jackson emptied out altogether, and Capitol Street, the bustling avenue that Medgar Evers boycotted in 1962, looked shuttered and ghosty, a Lott Furniture collecting dust on its desks. Entire industrial mills, warehouses, and office buildings had been abandoned just minutes from the capitol building, and it was hard not to be embarrassed by the naked deterioration of this American city, as if seeing a guy who’d accidentally left the house without his pants on. The Mall was just five minutes from downtown and business was ailing, so Dr. Shirley and others decided to buy it and turn it into the kind of place they knew would generate business among poor black people for quite some time: a health care mall for the sick.
Dr. Shirley, then seventy-nine years old, had observed for the last two decades a dispiriting development. The millions of dollars that poured into Mississippi every year—federal funds, Kellogg grants—had disappeared into wells of political and economic dysfunction. In fact, he said, in order to remind his guests that none of these problems would necessarily be fixed by the election of a black president, Dr. Shirley hung a COLORED sign above the doorframe of the entrance to one of his office rooms, which you had to walk under on your way to his bathroom. The implication was that Obama’s historic election wasn’t enough to transform people’s circumstances. Dr. Shirley had gray curly hair and a sad face, but he laughed when he talked about the other signs he made, including DON’T NEED NO TEA PARTY, MISSISSIPPI ALREADY HAS A KLAN and YOU CAN BE A CHRISTIAN AND A COWARD TOO and MUSLIMS DIDN’T ENSLAVE MY ANCESTORS, SO-CALLED CHRISTIANS DID.
“Lo
ok, Head Start was also once treated like a Communist conspiracy,” he told me one day, “like they’re doing with Obamacare. The anger against Obama reminds me of the reactions to JFK. When Kennedy was shot the white elementary and middle school children cheered. And you call yourself a Christian? It’s the same attitude. They don’t say it’s because he’s black, but you just listen to the rhetoric. Ninety percent of the whites in Mississippi, if it were Obama versus Sarah Palin, they will vote for Sarah Palin. I mean, this woman is dumb, this man is not! He’s got a family, he’s never been divorced! He represents all the values you cry about! And you’ll vote for Gingrich!
“I’m proud of Obama,” he continued. “But when he was trying to accommodate the Republicans, I became anxious and thought, When is he going to recognize that you can’t.”
Dr. Shirley had more reason for conveying his sympathy for Islam ever since 2009, when he heard about Iran’s rural health care model and realized it might be transplanted to Mississippi. He had worked outside of the system his entire life. He didn’t share the assumptions of American exceptionalism that many others did; namely, that the most advanced nation in the world didn’t take tips from poor countries, never mind a poorer country whose leaders regularly challenged American power. He did not think the American system, as it existed, could produce real change in people’s lives.
“I’ve been coming here for forty years,” he said one day after a trip to the Mississippi Delta, “and nothing has changed.”
Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation. A Mississippi black man’s life expectancy was lower than the average man’s expectancy was in 1960. Sixty-nine percent of adult Mississippians were obese and a quarter of households didn’t have access to decent, healthy food, so Mississippians were dying from diabetes, hypertension, congestive heart failure, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It was common to hear a sick person offhandedly mention that their thirty-nine-year-old cousin just had a stroke, or their thirty-two-year-old diabetic sister just lost a toe. In the 1960s people starved; now they died from cheap, terrible food.