Keen On

“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