FEBRUARY 12, 2025 – (Cont.) Now comes the third piece contributing to my “crisis of perception”: the Grand Dismantling of American government—conducted at breakneck speed with chainsaws and giant meat cleavers. The process is too deep, too broad, however, to examine fully in real time—or on this blog site. My readers—left, right and center—know the general outline of what President Musk has been doing since Inauguration Day.
What many people do not fully appreciate is how the flurry of executive action follows the blueprint of Project 2025, which, of course, presidential candidate Trump disavowed. More troubling, however, is that this action is the manifestation of Curtis Yarvin’s manifesto for an alt-right-absolutist-Libertarian (as contradictory as those descriptors might seem) destruction of democracy, which his tech billionaire followers (and JD Vance) seek to accomplish. (See my previous posts in this series.)
Whether you cheer or condemn the Great Dismantling is neither here nor there. What’s critical is that to grasp my “crisis of perception,” you need to know that I strongly disagree with the premises of the Great Dismantling and the process by which it is being executed. In short, you must know where I stand but needn’t agree with me to understand me.
My crisis of perception stems from a realization that the country as I once viewed it is something very different from what I’d believed.
The feeling is similar, I imagine, to that of a child who grows up assuming that his parent was a wise, pious, loving, righteous, gracious, generous, intelligent, if not infallible father; but then upon reaching adulthood, the child sees the father in a different light. Age and cirrhosis and an addled mind have conspired against the father to the point where his alcoholism can no longer be hidden from the now mature child. Nor can the father’s previously hidden history; his record as a spouse-abuser and abuser of the child’s older and younger siblings; an incorrigible guzzler with a long record of crime-ridden binges, loud and violent, mean and grotesque. The man’s life was monstrous underneath much that was an appealing façade. But despite that monstrosity, try as he might, the child can’t dispossess himself of his past, nor can the child eradicate the genuine and indelible love that he once felt toward the father.
Burdened by revelation, how does the adult-child now process his perception of his father? How does the child re-approach his relationship with the parent? With his other parent? With his siblings? With close friends and relatives who know both the son and the father? There exists no simple answer or “solution” except from the lips of a simpleton or the tongue of a charlatan.
And that, my readers, is where I find myself—the “grown-up child” facing his father who’s now disheveled by his own life-long truths. I’ve called my psychological predicament a “crisis of perception,” but it’s something deeper than an acute crisis. I fear it’s become something chronic and systemic.
And yet—still and again—I look to the bright side of life; to the sun, which always shines on no less than half the earth, even when our side is in the dark or in winter’s tilt or under storm clouds pregnant with rain. And perfecting her cartwheels through our living room is our nine-year-old granddaughter—surprisingly aware of the Grand Dismantling yet still ready to experiment more with her paints after another session with her grandmother at the Lego project table. Illiana and our grandson, whose smile and disposition are as fetching as hers, have just as much claim to the future as do the progeny of President Musk.
I say to our irrepressible granddaughter and grandson and the grandkids of all the people we know and love, “Go for it! Where we’ve failed, make this world a better place!”
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
