Could Sarah Palin join Descartes, Luther, Heidegger, and Derrida in the 25th-Century history of western civilization? Not by her intellectual contribution directly, but as the symbol of the last breath of that period now known as the Age of Reason that expired early in the 21st Century.
For something over two hundred years, western peoples by and large valued what they called "reason" and "science" [that aspect of knowledge that was verifiable, reproducible, and always subject to revision based on new information]. Reason was applied, in general, to their economic and political decisions.
But the inadequacies and dangers of the rationalist foundation became apparent, particularly in the twentieth century, when they gorged on an endless feast of war, genocide, and environmental destruction, based on those principles.
In 2008, in a "Heisenberg moment," an aging candidate for the presidency of the United States of America named John McCain, in a fit of Heisenbergian/Derridan deconstructive political action, selected as his eventual replacement a person name Sarah Palin, who embodied the new age of Soul-Wisdom, which recognizes the futility of facts, the uselessness of human speech in the conveyance of meaning, and the emptiness of what was quaintly referred to as "cognition" or "analysis."
Like Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, whose historical significance arises from his accidental place at the crossroads of political forces (beyond his control or even his understanding) leading to a horrific human war, Sarah Palin was the fortuitous locus of profound forces of Mystical Simplicity, the peaceful and life-affirming Faith which came to dominate the Western Hemisphere before the eventual rise of Americhina....