Hello readers! I'm back (I think!) from my sabbatical for the last three months after taking in, digesting, and processing the last few months of toxic political carnage in the United States.
Where I left off on my last post March 17th, I closed out my piece, “As history cycles, we, the people, are put in a position to wait for the stupid narcissistic majority to flame out under the weight of humbling self-destruction and humiliating implosion. Stand back for any debris; the shrapnel can be debilitating.”
What we've got on our hands here is nothing short of fascism, full stop. Nothing drives the point home more than a gulag in El Salvador, ICE raids, DOGEing of our government, and Alligator Alcatraz Auschwitz, to name but a few fascistic manifestations.
And none of this sparks love in my heart. It is the opposite of Eros and libido. It is a fascistic death cult on the march.
During my time of reflection, I've been considering the antidote to this fascistic political narcissistic abuse, a phrase that I coined, which reifies where we find ourselves in the United States politically.
What I've come up with is simple: love.
Please have a listen above to my latest video interview with narcissism expert, Prof. Sam Vaknin. In this video, he takes issue with my framing of love as the counterpoint to fascism as though they are opposites. He contends that fascism is predicated on in-group and out-group/inclusionary and exclusionary dynamics and that within a fascist group or government, there is love.
While he concedes that fascism is a narcissistic simulacrum and that the love that they feel is delusional as an outgrowth of the Paracosm, he differs with me on my bottom-line analysis and framing.
It's my contention that speaking in broad strokes that fascism is bad and unloving is sufficient for the exercise and struggle ahead; academic parsing to ostensibly get to a finer-grain truth is unnecessary and what gives academia a bad rap as insufferable. Even Vaknin agrees that fascism is fundamentally nihilistic.
If you'd like to see more analysis from me going forward or need a guest for your podcast or a collaborator on a project you have in mind, please let me know in the comments or email me at gingercoy@substack.com.
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And love over fascism!
-GC
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