October 21

 Sunny again today with fall-like temps. Supposed to be the same for the next few days.

This morning two segments caught my attention. The first concerned a focus group among registered Republicans where all said they all believed, still, that the election was stolen for Biden. The second concerned Ohio Senatorial candidate John Fetterman whether medical history (currently recovering from a stroke) should somehow disqualify him from being elected to the senate.

I am not at all surprised that the Republicans remain wedded to their beliefs. I saw a post title that claimed our politics have become a religion. I have said that before about economics and politics. The numbers of adherents in traditional religions have fallen over the last three or four decades while the arguments for economic theory and political postulates have been shrilly shouted with the same fervor and the same heated disparagement of alternative theories and postulates once reserved for alternate religions and sects. I read an interesting book, The Perfect Nazi. The author's grandfather was German and no-one would talk about him. Curious, he went in search of his grandfather's story and discovered the man had been a Nazi before Hitler came to power and was one of the few high placed Nazis who escaped efforts to arrest and prosecute him. But, and this is the point, he never wavered in his belief in the righteousness of the Nazi program. Similarly, the followers of William Miller in the 1830s held to their belief even when Christ failed to appear on the several dates Miller predicted. You can find details of the Millerite movement in When Prophecy Fails. How many Southerners discarded their beliefs in the righteousness of their "cause" when the South surrendered in 1865? Not many, and their descendants followed them to the present.

The discussion of Fetterman's capabilities struck me as terribly "ableist." And they took a leap in their assumptions from a difficulty formulating a thought in a spoken sentence to being unable to understand social/political/economic concepts and dealing with them. I always thought The Former Guy was incredibly inarticulate more often than not. Joe Biden sometimes stumbles on his words. Every now and then I sit here trying to drag a word or a name out of my brain. I am in their same age group. I have a friend from one of my stints in college forty years ago who worked harder than anyone I saw to master the course work. She listened to the lecture, wrote out her notes, read the book, listened to her recordings of the lectures, read her notes and amended them, re-read the book. Often she repeated the process several more times. Shortly before we graduated she was diagnosed as dyslexic. She not only finished her BA but completed an MA and has had a career as a teacher/librarian in a local school district. I haven't seen anything that says Fetterman can't function as a senator. Given some of the current members (whom I won't name) I think Fetterman would pass for a genius.