What Albert Camus Teaches Us About America: David Masciotra on a Country of Strangers,

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Earlier this week, we did a show with my old friend, Ece Temelkuran, the Turkish writer in exile. She has a new book out called Nation of Strangers. She rather likes the idea of strangers getting together to form new communities. Of course, the stranger is a new film from an old book. It's out. The film was made last year by François Ozon. It was a big hit at the Cannes Film Festival last year. It's been acclaimed in Europe. Got five stars in The Guardian. I'm looking forward to seeing it myself. I actually haven't seen it yet. Of course, it's based on Camus' famous short story, The Stranger, seminal 1942 novella according to Google. And it's the kind of short book that had an influence on all of us. It certainly had an influence on my old friend David Masciotra. He has a new piece out called A Country of Strangers, which is inspired by Ozon's new movie, but focuses on The United States. And when he describes The United States as a country of strangers, I don't think he means it as a compliment. Is that fair, David?

00:01:59 David Masciotra: Yes. Just one quick correction. I have not seen the movie either, so it's inspired by the novel. But like you, I intend to see it. But, yeah, I don't mean it as a flattering assessment of The United States. What I'm playing on there is, the protagonist of The Stranger is oddly detached from any kind of emotional life. He goes through various activities in the novel, including the funeral service for his own mother, more focused on his momentary whims, annoyances, and desires than the stakes of the situation and the ability and the opportunity to coalesce with others in empathy and solidarity. And my reading is that the United States of America suffers from a major problem of detachment in its own regard, in that 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, however, go back, I argue, to the root source of our refusal to maturely deal with mortality and issues of grief. So, yeah, I do not mean a country of strangers as a compliment. I mean that we're disengaged from one another, and that disengagement turns to alienation. And that alienation could therefore easily morph into the kind of communal and sociopolitical hostility that we witness on a daily basis here in The United States.

00:04:05 Andrew Keen: So, David, remind us of Camus' The Stranger. Everyone always talks about it as if everybody's read it, but, of course, they haven't. So perhaps you teach college. You're a cultural critic. Remind us what this book is about and why it's about estrangement, alienation.

00:04:28 David Masciotra: Well, Camus, of course, was an existentialist. He never used the label, but the label's been applied to him pretty accurately. And he was fascinated by the absurd. And he said that the stranger is his attempt to write a story that details man's confrontation with absurdity in its nakedness. So the story doesn't have much of a plot. It involves a Frenchman in French Algeria who, as I say at the beginning of the novel, learns of the death of his mother. And by reading about his behavior at her memorial, we quickly learn that this man is completely separated from any attempt to engage with the meaning of life. Now Camus argued—

00:05:26 Andrew Keen: His name is Meursault, sir.

00:05:28 David Masciotra: Yes. Meursault. Yeah. And Camus, of course, argued that meaning was in the eye of the beholder, that we determine our own meaning in life as any proper existentialist would submit. But this Meursault, you know, just rejects any opportunity to find meaning in life. So therefore, later in the novel, you know, spoiler alert, I suppose, when he murders an Arab man on the beach, once again, he has absolutely no feeling, not for his victim, not for himself. And the novel then becomes a novella, I should say. It's only about 100 pages. Most people listening to your show could read it in one or two sittings. It becomes a sustained reflection and exploration on, as you say, estrangement, as Camus said, absurdity, and on the costs of a refusal to seek out and establish, for oneself, a sense of meaning in our short time here on Earth. And even though Camus' writing dealt with the worst of topics, plagues, unjust wars, terrorism, fascism, Camus was also a writer who, in The Myth of Sisyphus, a great example which just appeared on the screen, was seeking ways to claim life as a staging ground of not only rebellion, as he writes in his book-length essay, The Rebel, but also love and meaning and even joy. And in The Rebel, he writes that anyone who rebels against something simultaneously rebels in favor of something else. So, The Stranger is a novel that takes a look at a man who has separated himself from life, but found nothing to rebel in the name of. And he suffered—

00:07:49 Andrew Keen: I reread it actually for this conversation, David. As you said, it's a short book. So it's easy to reread. The book is written in the first person. It reads very reasonably. It almost could be as if he's a social scientist, an analyst of his own life and of society. So on one level, there's a deep kind of rationality to it. On the other hand, that's associated with separation from himself, from his own emotions, from the world. So in a way, I mean, this is the kind of book where you can look for all sorts of interpretations, but there certainly is one reading of The Stranger, which might suggest it's a critique of social science, of our ability to detach ourselves from the world to try to understand it.

00:08:57 David Masciotra: Yeah. I think that many of the great writers in the literary canon, Camus, Hemingway, Toni Morrison, we can name others. They resort to telling stories because they realize that the analytical project eventually reaches a dead end. It's not to say that they were anti-intellectual, but it is to say that if one looks at life as material in a laboratory to dissect according to an über-rationale, then life ends up feeling pretty empty and meaningless. And that storytelling, whether it's done on a page such as a novella or novel or even on a stage or screen, when it's done well, allows us to engage our intellect with something that still contains mystery and the truth of the imagination, which maintains the possibility of a more affectionate and passionate engagement with reality. So I think that's a very wise observation that you make.

00:10:29 Andrew Keen: One of the other ways of interpreting The Stranger — and I reread not only the book itself but also the Wikipedia entries. It's just that some interpretations read it as if Meursault had some kind of autism, some kind of condition. What's your reading of that given especially the national obsession, it seems, in America these days with being on the spectrum and autism and all these other supposed disabilities?

00:11:05 David Masciotra: Yeah. I saw that when I wrote my piece. I didn't reread The Stranger in its entirety. I reread some of my favorite passages, which I knew I wanted to mention in the essay. And then I also looked at the Wikipedia, just for some of the basic facts, like I didn't remember the year of publication and things of that nature. And I saw that some people have developed this interpretation. We pathologize everything. That's a peculiar American quality. I see it online all the time. I know some people personally who've done it. They've diagnosed themselves as ADHD or autistic. I find that rather silly and unhelpful, but also to connect it to what we were talking about just a moment ago, indication that there's a refusal to confront the unpleasant parts of life. You know, not every unpleasant experience requires medical intervention. Not every personality foible or quirk requires diagnosis. My wife is a social worker who works with adults who have developmental disabilities, and it's not chic to her clients. It's not something to catastrophize. I mean, many of her clients have productive, joyful lives, but it's also not something that's chic. It's not something that's fashionable, and I feel that there's an odd and unhealthy quality of life in The United States now that it's almost become fashionable for people to declare themselves on the spectrum or mentally ill. And, as perhaps Camus would appreciate according to his philosophy, it all indicates a retreat from the messiness of life.

00:13:36 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, it affects the way we think about death. We did a show a couple of months ago with the biographer of Jessica Mitford, who, of course, was the author of The American Way of Death — a 1963 book, which is still a classic on America's funeral and funeral industry. David, what are you arguing in 'A Country of Strangers' about the way in which there's an indifference to death in The United States? Maybe in some ways, things haven't changed in the sixty years since or the more than sixty years since Mitford wrote her classic book.

00:14:18 David Masciotra: Well, part of it is personal for me. I've written a series of essays, all for CounterPunch, that I'm calling grief reflections for lack of a better word. I had a dear friend of mine die in September 2024. Her name was Alana Ford. She was an executive staff member of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, which was founded by Jesse Jackson. And then Jesse Jackson himself died, with whom I also had a friendship. I wrote a biography of him.

00:14:54 Andrew Keen: And we did a show after Jesse's death.

00:14:57 David Masciotra: That was an excellent show. I really appreciated you giving me the opportunity. And I'm thinking about how it's very difficult to properly grieve in a society that doesn't value human life, because grief requires a sustained reflection on the value of human life. What was the value of Alana's life? What was the value of Jesse Jackson's life? What's the value of a human life more broadly? And in the United States of America, we've turned, as Mitford herself wrote quite brilliantly, everything into an opportunity for consumption, and we live with such a fleeting attention span that when a mass shooting occurs, or when we read that tens of thousands of people die every single year because they lack health insurance, or when a pandemic occurs as one did just a few years ago, and hundreds of thousands of people die, some of whom unnecessarily. And we have all of these crises. We've cultivated an ability to just move on from it in a way that is profoundly debilitating toward the development of a democratic community that can protect and promote human life. And some of this goes back, of course, to the nation's founding, that was predicated upon the massacre of the indigenous population, and chattel slavery of the African population.

00:16:48 Andrew Keen: I take your point, David. Let me push back on this. I mean, I like the piece that you wrote in CounterPunch, a country of strangers, death, despair, and indifference in The United States. But some people might listen to this and think, well, David's entirely wrong. Look what happened in Minnesota. Look what happened on the streets of Minneapolis after two people were murdered by the police or by ICE. There was a massive resistance, an eruption which is still reverberating both on the streets of Minneapolis and throughout the nation. So, couldn't one take a completely opposite interpretation? You're, of course, right. Not everyone was horrified by these two deaths, but many people were, and it seems to have triggered the most coherent reaction and response to the MAGA movement. So how would you respond to that argument?

00:17:47 David Masciotra: Well, taking a look at that, those stories, Renee Goode, Alex Priddy, their murders on the streets of Minneapolis. Yes. They did generate large resistance. This is a big country. So, you know, we have over 300,000,000 people residing in The United States. If just a very small percentage of those people take to the streets, it appears as if it's a massive sociopolitical movement, and it did have consequences. But what I would argue is that, just like the murder of George Floyd, typically, a sociopolitical response to an injustice, including a fatal injustice, requires sensational imagery. The sensationalistic must play a part in the way that Americans consume the news. Otherwise, the majority of people never even learn about injustices. So for example, to this day, ICE is continuing to abduct people. They're continuing to abuse people in their detention facilities. The political system and mainstream media discourse has essentially moved on, with a "been there, done that" attitude. I could give you a personal example. A few weeks ago, I spent some time pitching around to various publications, a story on Alligator Alcatraz down in Florida, which is, you know, essentially a concentration camp for mainly Latino immigrants. And nearly every editor said, oh, we already covered that over a year ago. So even your example, it sparked a heroic resistance, and I ran an interview with someone who was part of that, an ICE observer in Minneapolis. You can find it on my Substack or CounterPunch, and there are people still dedicated to humanizing, civilizing, and democratizing American life. But the system, the political system, which revolves around electoral politics, big business, which increasingly dominates our macro and micro economies, and the mainstream media, they move on rather quickly. So there's always this tussle, this tug of war between those like my friends who I mentioned, who want to build a beloved community to invoke the words of Martin Luther King. And, the most dominant and in many ways triumphant forces in American life who are trying to stifle and suppress those movements and those provocations for discourse.

00:20:57 Andrew Keen: You're right in the piece about America not honoring its dead. Of course, there's perhaps a more conservative take on that. I mean, they might argue we got military cemeteries, the Arlington Cemetery, many others around the country, and that the military honors their dead. How would you respond to that in terms of your analysis in a country of strangers? Is the military in its own way, even if you're not necessarily a huge admirer of them, David, is that the model for respecting death?

00:21:28 David Masciotra: Yeah. I think that there's a hierarchy of victims to borrow a phrase from Noam Chomsky, who were, you know, perhaps no longer allowed to quote...

00:21:40 Andrew Keen: That's right. Jeffrey Epstein.

00:21:43 David Masciotra: Right. Send me to jail. But Chomsky had a very useful phrase, hierarchy of victims. And, oftentimes, combat veterans, members of the American military, they get elevated to the top of that hierarchy after the political fallout. Of course, that didn't happen during the Vietnam War, but many years after the Vietnam War, we started to honor veterans of the Vietnam War. But when we look at other victims, we have to consider how for many, many years, there was barely even acknowledgment of their existence. So take a look at the work that the Equal Justice Initiative is doing, to put up lynching memorials throughout The United States. This is all very recent work because for many years, there was a refusal to even acknowledge that these lynchings occurred. The same goes for those who die on a yearly basis. I've already mentioned these people, just because they don't have health insurance. The same goes for the indigenous in this country. We still have not fully even acknowledged that—

00:23:09 Andrew Keen: David, David.

00:23:10 David Masciotra: Ongoing catastrophe.

00:23:12 Andrew Keen: People are listening to this. We've had this argument so many times on this show. Some people might say, well, you know, my relatives only showed up in this country thirty years ago or twenty five years ago. The fate of the indigenous peoples from five hundred years ago is really neither here nor there for me. And why would a country — I mean, this is getting away a little bit from your broader argument in a country of strangers. But isn't there another extreme where a country is obsessed with death, death, and despair? They're not sufficiently indifferent. For a country to be functional, there requires a degree of indifference. Otherwise, they spend their whole time, in memoriam, sitting shiva essentially.

00:24:03 David Masciotra: Well, what I would say is — I would address that in a few different ways. First of all, I'm not talking about guilt. I'm not talking about collective guilt that, for example, if you're white or have some ancestor who was a settler in The United States, you should flagellate yourself in guilt every morning as recompense for the indigenous. What I'm saying is having a shared national memory that includes highlights and reckons with the good and the bad. So nobody says, for example, when we've tried out Ken Burns or whatever on the Founding Fathers or when we hear countless tributes for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, we should just get over that, you know, my relatives weren't here when the founders were here. So if it's okay to have that active preservation for what we wanna celebrate, we should also have that act of preservation for what we want to mourn. And another example to look at when we make that particular point is the lost cause of the Confederacy. Never properly dealing with the Civil War allowed for the resurgence of white supremacist movements throughout our society. And none of this — none of this fails to produce contemporary problems and troubles. So for example, when I say that we have a sustained failure to mourn, I'm not only referring to history, but let's take a look at the problem of gun violence. We're the only developed country in the world that has said, well, we want to have high-powered firearms. We wanna have easy access to high-powered firearms. So therefore, sending our citizens to live in fear when they attend a concert or a church service or they enter their synagogue or they walk through school or the mall. That's just the price of freedom. That indicates a failure to mourn that has increased in just a very short period of time. If you go back to 1999, the Columbine shooting, that stopped the country. Now mass shootings barely make the news. So we have found a way to process all of this unnecessary death in such a way that makes our society much less humane and sets up further atrocities and further miseries.

00:27:01 Andrew Keen: David, your piece in CounterPunch on The Stranger is called 'A Country of Strangers.' There was actually, a book called A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America by David Shipler that did rather well back in 1997 about the psychological landscape where blacks and whites meet. Camus' book, The Stranger, is not about blacks and whites, but it is about Europeans or white Europeans and Muslims. Perhaps you might compare these two themes in the Camus novella and then in contemporary America.

00:27:45 David Masciotra: Yeah. That's an interesting conversation because there are some contemporary critics of The Stranger who fault Camus for not more overtly addressing colonialism. I find that criticism silly because as you noted earlier, this is a first-person narration. And, as we've established, Meursault doesn't care about anything. He doesn't even care about his own mother's death. So why would he care about the effects of colonialism? It wouldn't even register to him. But even within that limited confine of the voice that Camus has created, we do see the effects of it because as I mentioned earlier, he murders an Arab man, and this Arab man is a subject of the colonial project. This happens in French Algeria. So it gives us an opportunity to consider the way in which certain human beings are devalued. And once again, to consider that hierarchy of victims. And I'm hardly breaking new ground here, or shocking any of the listeners when I say that throughout The United States, throughout the history of The United States, black Americans have certainly ranked lower than white Americans in the eyes of the law, in the eyes of the most powerful institution.

00:29:25 Andrew Keen: And, as Shipler notes in his book, and he's amongst the many authors that have addressed this, the failure for black Americans and white Americans to actually talk to one another — a country of strangers — which was presumably true. I know less about Algeria in the fifties, but presumably true also in Algeria where the Europeans and the locals and those caught in between failed to talk to one another. And this is, of course, a novella about the absence of conversation. There are one or two verbal interactions between Meursault and his gang of white thugs and some local Arabs, and one of whom is murdered by Meursault, but it's not in any way conversation.

00:30:12 David Masciotra: No. No. And, you know, it's interesting. I mentioned my friend, Alana Ford, earlier. She was a black woman, and I've been doing some writing about her and some writing about grief and friendship. And it's striking how when you study American history, how few examples there are of interracial and cross-gender friendships, and alliances that played a major role in American political movements, in American business, in American entertainment. So one can observe the legacy of segregation, how it went from a legal to a social to a self-imposed process. Not only in the horror stories that we all learn in school, but also through the absence of stories that provide inspirational examples of people transcending those limits. You know, Alana, I remember once said to my wife, Sarah and me, and this was a very, highly educated, cultured woman. She said, you know, you are the first close white friends I've had. She lived in Chicago. And we said to her, well, you're the first close black friend we've had. Unfortunately, this is just the nature of reality in American life where we preach diversity. But judging from our own behavior, we don't really want it.

00:32:01 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It reminds me of my conversation with my wife. She always says to me, you're the first white husband I've ever had. And I always say back to her, well, you're the first black wife. So, I take your point, David. Well, I think what we need to do is we both need to see the movie, the Ozon movie. It looks great. It's on in San Francisco in the next few weeks. And if I don't watch it in the cinema, I'll see it online. And then maybe we can do another show where we talk about the movie, talk about the stranger, and maybe some other Camus stuff. I know you're very well read in Camus. You think he's, as I do, a very important writer. It's not just The Stranger. It's The Plague and many others, his work on Sisyphus, The Myth of Sisyphus, is really important. So maybe we'll reconvene, David, to talk more Camus. But for the moment, your piece in CounterPunch, a country of strangers, death, despair, and indifference in The United States is a good follow-up, I think, to Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death. So as always, David, a real pleasure and honor to talk to you. Keep well, and we'll talk again soon about Albert Camus. Thank you again.

00:33:27 David Masciotra: I'll look forward to it. Let's do it.