“We’ve learned how to tolerate acts of violence, acts of widespread death, disease — that other developed nations simply don’t tolerate. And that tolerance manifesting in myriad political failures — all of which go back to our refusal to maturely deal with mortality and issues of grief.” — David Masciotra

Earlier this week, we talked to Ece Temelkuran about her book Nation of Strangers, a manifesto about strangers finding one another. But for the cultural critic David Masciotra, strangerdom is the problem rather than the solution. Contemporary America, he argues in his new essay A Country of Strangers, has become a place of death, despair and indifference.

Masciotra takes his cue from Albert Camus’ 1942 novella The Stranger. Camus’ Meursault — the narrator of The Stranger — is a man completely detached from meaning. He attends his own mother’s funeral without feeling anything. He murders an Arab man on a beach without motive. He faces his execution with a shrug. Masciotra’s argument is that the United States has become Meursault writ large. America’s failure is existential rather than political. It is a failure to mourn — a sustained refusal to engage with death, grief, and the weight of history that produces a society of strangers who cannot connect with one another across race, class, or geography.

So is Masciotra right? Are we all Meursault now? What can Albert Camus teach us about America?

Five Takeaways

• Meursault and America: The Same Detachment. Camus’ man who attends his mother’s memorial without feeling, murders without motive, faces execution with a shrug. Masciotra’s argument: America has adopted this posture toward mass death. Columbine stopped the nation in 1999. Mass shootings now barely register.

• A Failure to Mourn. Not guilt — mourning. If the Founding Fathers are worth preserving in active memory, so are those they enslaved. Never properly grieving the Civil War allowed white supremacy to resurge. Never properly mourning mass shootings allows them to accelerate. The failure to grieve is political, not sentimental.

• Is Meursault Autistic? Some critics read him as neurodivergent. Masciotra disagrees: Camus’ portrait is moral refusal, not neurological condition. You can’t medicate a country into empathy.

• The Colonial Murder. Meursault murders an Arab man in French Algeria and feels nothing. The hierarchy of victims. In America, Black Americans have historically ranked lower in the eyes of law and institution. Shipler’s 1997 A Country of Strangers documented the same failure of Black and white Americans to actually talk to one another.

• You Are the First Close White Friends I’ve Had. Masciotra’s friend Alana said this to him and his wife. They said the same back. Self-imposed segregation in a society that preaches diversity but doesn’t really want it.

About the Guest

David Masciotra is a cultural critic and the author of six books including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy. His Substack is Absurdia Now.

References

A Country of Strangers by David Masciotra, CounterPunch, May 1, 2026
Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942)
François Ozon, The Stranger (2024 film)
David Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (1997)

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: two kinds of strangers
00:01:59 What America’s country of strangers means
00:04:05 What is Camus’ The Stranger?
00:08:57 Storytelling vs the analytical project
00:10:29 Is Meursault autistic?
00:15:00 America’s failure to mourn
00:24:03 Collective guilt vs shared national memory
00:27:45 The colonial reading of The Stranger
00:30:12 Alana: the first close white friends