The Most Dangerous Woman in America? Sarah Palin and Her Desire For An Honorable America

T H E M O S T D A N GE R O U S W O M A N I N A M E R I C A ?
S a r a h P a l i n a n d h e r d e s i re f o r a n h o n o r a b l e A m e r i c a
She raises up the poor from the dust;

she lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes
and inherit a seat of honor.
For the pillars of the earth are the lord’s,
and on them she has set the world (1Sam. 2:8 revised)
singing,
“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honor
and power and might
be to our god forever and ever! Amen.” (Rev. 7:12 revised)
Fumbling towards Ecstasy in Neverland. Today, Americans, as well as citizens from many
other countries of the world, find themselves living under a state of exception, where normal
Lyle Brecht Draft 3.4 Saturday, December 5, 2009 Page 1 of 16

rules of encounter and engagement with the Other are suspended. Essentially, have we all
become detainees in a land of Neverland?1
What, most of all, defines this current discourse of exceptionality is a suspension of the
willingness and ability to mourn for those whom we kill in the name of America’s global war on
terrorism (GWOT). Or, in the name of almost any other imperial policy decisions (or lack of just
decisions) that immiserates large numbers of humans presently inhabiting this earth that we all
share in common.2
Judith Butler so poignantly asks: If our encounters with the black and white of
fundamentalisms (whether on the right or on the left) are really “an insurrection at the level of
ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might
reality be remade?” 3 The insight of Jacob Taubes, in his, The Political Theology of Paul,
resonates with one answer to these questions that today is being challenged more and more
even by those who claim their Christianity – for Jesus’ life and teachings say that: “Love means
that I am not centered in myself…. But, rather: I have a need. The other person is needed. I
can’t do without the other.” 4
Where is this de-centering of the other, this primal judgement that relegates persons as either
in or out, determined by some self-referentiality – justified by interiority and convenience - leave
us?5 I would like to suggest that in today’s post-cold war world, unless policy makers
understand this question deeply and are willing to wrestle with the policy implications of its
various answers from the perspective of human justice, future policy recommendations will be
nothing more than whistling in the wind or just more of the same in different clothes.
As a means to explicate the role of othering in today’s policy discussions, I would like to
explore just one instantiation of many examples of the irrational support for under-researched
and misunderstood policy concepts.6 The hope is that if we can understand better this one
example, as policy makers and as citizens, we may begin to make sense of some of the
motivations behind policy that when that policy is analyzed, makes no sense at all.
Policies for Cave Dwellers and Polar Bears. Examples of policies that, when analyzed, make
no sense at all are legion today. Today, maybe the most immediate global consequential and
catastrophic threats are from nuclear war and from global warming.7 The probability of nuclear
war is directly determined by policy. This policy is a 60-year old policy of nuclear deterrence
based on an out-dated and largely disproved economic theory called rational choice theory
that was incorporated into the game of mutual assured destruction.8 Is it rational to continue to
play a game of nuclear deterrence that is out-of-date and unwinnable? In the past 64-years,

the world has allocated approximately $60,000 billion to national defense. The world will spend
$1,500 billion (U.S.) this year alone for national defense. The overdetermining belief is that
national defense primarily renders a nation safer. Is this belief rational?
Scientists have proven with ever more detail and preciseness that global warming is occurring
today. Few members of the public would decide to challenge physicists concerning the details
of quantum physics. Claiming that the theory of quantum physics was a hoax would be hard to
swallow. Unfortunately, this questioning of basic physical reality (global warming and is effects
can be demonstrated as clearly as the effects of a nuclear explosion) has been used to forestall
policy development. The longer policy decisions are delayed and appropriate mitigation does
not occur, the more expensive the consequential effects. Today, if 350 PPM CO2 is the tipping
point (latest MIT studies), the cost of mitigation may exceed $20,000 billion. However, the
global consequences of doing nothing may result in the morbidity of as many as a few billion
humans, large numbers species lost and a worst case economic impact of $200,000 billion.
May I ask, how is it rational to continue to delay policy decisions when so much is at stake?
To understand what may be driving this non-rationality in post cold-war policy, I suggest we
examine the phenomenon of Sarah Palin in America. For, in may ways, she is an epitome of
irrational support for under-researched and misunderstood policy concepts. The questions are:
Why do we cling to irrational or non-rational policy concepts? What has happened to
rationality? What is driving rationality from the policy conversations? Can we learn anything
that may assist us in formulating policy and its supporting arguments from someone on the
political scene like a Sarah Palin?
The Naked Beauty of Unadorned Honor-Killings. I would like to suggest that Palin is
promoting an atavistic, unreconstructed honor as a legitimate and recognizable rationale for we
fight or why rational policy alternatives can be rejected outright, without thoughtful analysis or
consideration. How this is so much easier. Policy judged useful (or useless) without the fuss
and effort of actually attempting to rationally discern the truth or falsity of warrants that are
assumed or claimed by the policy choice. Policies are chosen based on nothing stronger than
one’s desire, independent of any rational analysis, because for our honor we need them to be
so.
Palin offers her listeners a return to an honor-shame world of black and white, right and wrong,
where men are manly and feminism is as extinct as the dinosaurs. For Palin, policy must
embody a reconstructed world that defines “manliness” with the warrior, with destructive acts
of violence, and with oppression of the other. For her followers, what a relief to the policy
worldview of our ‘soft,’ ‘feminized,’ liberal, post-Enlightenment rational world. Her argument is

essentially that for honor, one must do his/her duty to fight for what one believes is right, come
what may, no matter what results from it - truth be damned. Arguing policy with non-
consequential deontologists when their honor is at stake is difficult, but constitutes today’s
decision landscape.
Sarah Palin may be many things, but she may also be an instantiation of a Joan of Arc-like
figure, a cultural priestess of a newfound honor? Unlike the soft-headed and unsatisfying
reasons provided by mainline Christianity and post-Enlightenment rational morality that why we
fight is for good against evil, Palin, in her recapitulation of christianity, offers a more satisfying
answer: we fight for our honor; for the true American-way. And, we love her for telling us the
truth; for freeing us from our misguided post-Enlightenment rationality.
Honor Trumps Charmin® Ultra-Soft Christianity. That is why someone claiming to be

Christian, can, in the next sentence, yell with all her passion: “Hang them high!” when referring
to Guantanamo detainees, those classed as indeterminate entities between persons and
prisoners of war, not yet adjudicated as guilty or innocent of anything other than being classed
as a detainee.9 How much easier. Judged guilty or innocent without the fuss and effort of
actually attempting to discern the truth of innocence or guilt. They are guilty because for our
honor we need them to be so.
For Palin, this is the reformulated christianity of the freshly self-anointed; the christianity of the
rightly honorable in their fight for the real America’s true American-way. This is what the social
scientists have say say about the honor-rich society of first century Judaism, when Jesus was
walking the earth:
Honor and shame were the core, the heart, the soul of social life in Mediterranean
antiquity…. Honor is considered a limited good, quite like those other scarce resources
that include land, crops, livestock, political clout, and female sexuality. Being limited,
honor gained by one is always honor lost and taken from another…. [H]onor determines
dress, mannerisms, gestures, vocation, and posture, as well as who can eat with whom,
who sits at what places at a meal, who can open a conversation, who has the right to
speak, and who is accorded an audience. It serves as the prime indicator of social
place… and provides the essential map for persons to interact with superiors, inferiors,
and equals in socially prescribed or appropriate ways. 10

Whereas Christian honor, at least Christian as explicated in Scripture and much of Church
history is primarily defined by our participation in the gospel and our relationality with a kenotic
Jesus and his Father, Palin defines a new form of christian honor that judges who is in and who
is out. Gone are the old Christian ethics and morality (not always practiced, but professed) that
reflects Jesus’ “self-sharing for the good of others” 11 or treating all others honorably, whether
they belong to one’s honor group or not, as well as post-Enlightenment Rawlsian ethics that
"most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a
fair position."
In her new christian vision of morality, Palin reintroduces a form of unreconstructed honor
practiced by openly imperialistic, totalitarian regimes. Old, mainline Christian honor is just too
soft, too liberal for her tastes. Below, Heinrich Himmler contrasts “the weak and gentle ethos of
Christianity” with the honor due to the “aggressive male warrior,” in line with Palin’s tough talk
to ‘Hang them high!”
Which of us wandering through the lovely German countryside and coming unawares
upon a crucifix does not feel deep in his heart… a strange but enduring sense of
shame? The gods of our ancestors were different. They were men, and carried in their
hands a weapon…. How different is yonder pale figure on the Cross, whose passivity
and emphasized mien of suffering express only humility and self-abnegation, qualities
which we, conscious of our heroic blood, utterly deny…12
My guess is that in Palin’s extensive knowledge of Scripture, she has forgotten that Jesus
Christ was, himself, a victim of an honor killing by the type of manly-man men referred by
Heinrich Himmler above. In final analysis, Palin’s new christianity resembles more closely this
pagan form of unreconstructed honor.
In particle physics, a physical description of the structure of an atom can be visualized as a

football field with a grape sitting on the fifty-yard line representing the nucleus of the atom and
the electrons circulating out in the end zones.13 The salient aspect of this image is that an atom
is mostly empty space. Maybe this also describes Palin’s conception of honor: her
understanding of how honor really works, what it is good for, and how it might be
reconstructed is mostly empty space – an unknown.
Might History Have Something to Reveal to Us about Honor-Killing? From history, we learn
where Heinrich Himmler’s manly honor leads. The horrific wars of herem,14 starting in Old
Testament times, the An Shi Rebellion in China (756-763) that claimed 10-million lives, and

continuing through the carnage of the First World War, the honor-war to end all wars. From
post-WWI history, we know pretty well the consequences of unreconstructed pagan cultural
honor - even more bloodshed and devastation. Fighting for honor by the National Socialist
government of Germany’s Third Reich (kingdom), cost the lives of 49 million people, most of
whom were civilians, including the extermination of six million Jews and the murdering or
enslaving of hundreds of thousands of Poles, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners, Gypsies (Romas)
and handicapped German nationals (all members of out groups).15 Stalin was so honor-driven,
he turned the Russian state into a virtual industrialized torture prison that resulted in tens of
millions of deaths of those deemed to be in the current, ever-changing out group. Colonization
of Africa and India, by definition, relegated whole peoples to less than full-human status that
justified the honor killings of more millions of out group others. China’s Cultural Revolution
(1966-1976) was entirely about ridding the country of misfits, defined as anyone who was in an
out group, all for the honor of the party. As many as 500,000 people were killed. Between 1980
and 1988, Iraq fought Sadam’s Qadisiyyah, known in Iran as the Holy Defense over honor. This
Iran-Iraq War cost another 500,000 lives. Is that why the U.S. is still fighting in Iraq today and
has only recently escalated an unnecessary and destructive war in Afghanistan. Are these
intentional, interminable wars of occupation really for America’s honor? Continuance of war to
avoid the dishonor of retreat and withdrawal. Could it really be just that simple?
The stakes for settling honor disputes continue to rise: the number of nuclear devices has
grown from a few in 1950 controlled by two nuclear states to 31,732 nuclear devices controlled
by nine nuclear states 16 and more than 40 other states with 3,755 tons of weapons-usable
fissile materials that could be used to make 240,000 nuclear weapons. 17 Even newer weapons
systems beyond nukes include space laser weaponry and plasma weapons that turn matter
(and human beings) into mushy atoms.18 Where does honor, or lack of it, fit into establishing
policy to slow abrupt climate change, for example, that threatens the lives of as many of two
billion humans on earth? In a world where honor is a zero sum game, fighting is always
necessary. For either I have this limited, precious quality, or you do. If you have more than I, the
only way I have of gaining more honor, if this is my objective, is to take some of yours.
What is different, at least in theory, as to how the honor game is played in Christianity is that it
is a non-zero sum game. Both of us can gain in honor, or conversely lose honor concurrently.
My gain does not require your loss. What enables us to encounter one another with honor
without fighting over a set-limit of honor is first and foremost an anamnesis of our relationality,
one with the other and with Christ, rather than our differences that define both some Old
Testament and unreconstructed pagan notions of honor. Christianity establishes that our

relationality with God determines the model for how we honorably encounter the Self, our
neighbor, and the very good creation that God made for us to live in. Honor is achieved through
God’s gift to us. We are not required to fight with our neighbor for it.19 The honorable “‘truth
event’ of revelation, will ultimately be the imperative to love – to love God and to manifest this
love as love of neighbor.”20 “One is not simply before the other but is in the very heart of one’s
‘identity’ an articulation of responsibility for the other.”21
To answer Palin’s siren song to return to the world of black and white, where men are manly in
their unreconstructed acting out of honor appears somewhat risky today in an age of nuclear
hair triggers and catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. Palin’s assurances that she has
the answers notwithstanding. This new-old unreconstructed honor-shame society of hers is not
remotely Christian. It is more pagan, retrogressive, and dangerous. That she chooses to self-
referentially believe in an unreconstructed pagan honor and name it christian does not make it
so and never will - at least to anyone with eyes to see and ears to listen.
Deontology Emerges in a Non-Consequentialist, Nasty Form. If Palin’s ethics and morality

around honor and what constitutes the real America’s true American-way, is not in the least bit
Christian, what is it? I claim what lies beneath the christian veneer, looking through the smoke
and mirrors of rhetoric and cant, is unabashed consequence-independent deontology. Duty-
bound honor without the caveats . Her argument is essentially the same argument as Krishna’s
high deontology in the Bhagavadgita portion of the Mahabharata epic: for honor, one must do
his/her duty to fight for what one believes is the truth come what may, “no matter what results
from it.”22 This is the type of unreconstructed pagan honor that Palin is selling.
While Krishna’s god-like unwavering pronouncements win the day against Arjuna’s softer, more
rational, consequence-sensitive arguments for not wanting to fight, the Mahbharata ends
largely as a tragedy with unplanned massive death and destruction as the consequence of
following one’s duty and honor-bound consequence-independent givens as to what is right. J.
Robert Oppenheimer quotes from the Bhagavadgita as he watched, on July 16, 1945, the
Trinity explosion of the first fission atomic bomb that he had helped wrought: “I am become
death, the destroyer of worlds.”23 So much for consequence-independent deontological
derived honor.
What Oppenheimer was getting at is that duty-bound honor must address: (a) consequences
to real-live people. Human beings matter. Launching a nuclear counterattack that destroys life
on the planet because it is the right and honorable thing to do is the ultimate immoral and
unethical act. Consequences, in the end, always matter; and (b) there is always the thorny

issue of personal accountability and willingness to take responsibility for one’s actions.
Claiming that “I was duty bound to defend my honor” carries little weight if one is not also
willing to own up to and be responsible for the consequences of one’s actions.24 But, maybe
that is all too much to ask for a huckster like Sarah Palin and her ilk.
Sarah Palin’s desire for an honorable America is dangerous. Her gaff-filled speeches and
twisted-beyond-intelligibility illogical language still appeals. Bypassing our cerebral cortex, she
lands smack at the limbic brain level - our more primitive, pre-Enlightenment brains. Rationality
be dammed. This is really all about fighting for America’s honor. Is there really any better way to
understand why President Obama, after months of consultations and deep consideration has
decided to further escalate the Af-Pak War after eight long years and $500 billion spent - to
accomplish what again? Might all the talk about Afghanistan as key geopolitical geography for
twarting terrorism and the national security importance to America of this war or the left-unsaid
gimportance of this geography for oil and natural gas transshipment pipelines just meager
rationalizations for why we still fight a war there? A war for control of a failed state that, just like
Vietnam, is a quagmire and at least from historical precedent is unlikely to be won. Do we fight
because it is the honorable thing to do? Is it our duty, consequences be damned?
Channelling Big-Time Honorific Violence and Killing. As the epigram to Chapter Three,
“Drill, Baby, Drill,” of her pre-Presidential bid memoir, Going Rogue, Palin attributes the
following quote to the Basketball Hall of Fame coach John Wooden:
Our land is everything to us… I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We
remember our grandfathers paid for it–with their lives.
Only the quote was written by a Native American, John Wooden Legs, not John Wooden the
basketball coach. The quote appeared in an essay entitled “Back on the War Ponies,” included
in the 2003 anthology, We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of American History,
edited by Nathaniel May, Clint Willis, and James W. Loewen. This anthology “collects the
personal accounts, letters, speeches and other documents that, together, tell the untold story
of American history.”25 Here’s the full quote:
Our land is everything to us. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes talk the
Cheyenne language to each other. It is the only place where Cheyennes remember the
same things together. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We
remember our grandfathers paid for it–with their life. My people and the Sioux defeated
General Custer at the Little Big Horn. There never was an Indian victory after that... They

took my people away from Montana. They took them to Oklahoma Indian Territory. The
people were sick there in all the heat and dust. They asked to go home again, but they were
locked up in a military prison instead.26
Is Palin actually channelling here what was potentially the most horrific honor fighting the world
may have ever witnessed? Fighting that killed as many as 125 million American Indians from
1492 to 1616. Fighting where non-in-group adversaries were hacked apart, burned alive,
hunted as game, fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped, worked to death as slave labor
and deliberately exposed to diseases their immune systems were unable to fight.27 John
Wooden Legs memories of the treatment of the Cheyennes was an account of just the
mopping up of the remainder. All calculation and denial: necessary utility, for constructing the
Great Empire:
Where global capitalism,

its twin doxys, utilitarianism and consumerism,
Fund a never-ending War, a time of Exception
waged by nuclear secured states
against the Others
Outside the boundaries of the Gate.28
Is this the return to honor that Palin envisions? Is this the form of honor that appeals to so
many Americans today? In an America where the majority now discount the truthiness of
evolution.29 An America where growing numbers of disaffected citizens no longer believe that
global warming is human-caused. An America where Milton Friedman’s (1912-2006) inane
claim that “whatever the government does is bad.”30
Is honor for Palin really about restoring the true American-way at all costs, pushing away any
offending ideas or consequential considerations and vilifying those who might question this
unadorned quest for honor and power? Is this sought-for power nothing more than a veiled
retrenchment in belief in free markets and unfettered capitalism - that is the true American-
way?
The Honor of Free Markets, Capitalism & My Kind of christianity. Ever since St. Thomas
Aquinas proposed that market-set prices resulted in true economic value, this has served as an
article of faith in the West, most prominently in the United States. Most recently, this faith-
based belief has been bolstered by mathematical formulations and economic theory (validated
with Nobel prizes for economics). However, despite the math and theory, the underlying

predicates are the tenets of the rational choice theory: human beings act rationally (and
honorably!) as if to maximize their utility. That is, market transactions must be efficient (the
Efficient Market Theory) as no person would pay more in the transaction than their derived
utility for the good or service in question.31
If one, like Palin, subscribes to the wisdom of markets, then the following corollary is that any
government regulation of markets is bad for as Fredrich Hayek intimated in a 1945 article, “The
Use of Knowledge in Society,” “Any attempt to regulate prices or business activity was
doomed to thwart the movement of knowledge needed to make the economy run smoothly.” 32
This belief system was most vigorously marketed by the Chicago School of economics,
describing a free market form of economics championed by a group of economics professors
associated with, or trained at, the University of Chicago between approximately 1960 and 1980
led by Milton Friedman, a professor of economics there. However, this Chicago School
understanding of economics devolved into what some refer to as disaster capitalism: making a
huge fortune specifically from natural and planned disasters exacerbated by poverty, social
tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions.
Disaster capitalism’s raison d'être may be the promotion and generation of market
inefficiencies – pricing signals that distort real prices for goods and services and their real cost
to the environment, public health, and social justice.33 The most recent results of disaster
capitalism familiar to many was the 2008 meltdown of the CDO (collateralized debt obligations)
derivates market. Trillions of dollars of CDO insurance policies were sold. Hundreds of billions
of dollars in salaries and bonuses were paid to Wall Street bankers for effecting these sales.
But, all was smoke and mirrors. When the market collapsed, courtesy of our Federal Reserve
Bank and U.S. Department of Treasury, taxpayers were asked to put-up $17,489 billion in
reserve guarantees for the financial institutions holding CDOs (which had become toxic
assets).34 I would imagine that in Palin’s view, this was the honorable and right thing to do to
protect the honor of Wall Street bankers, free markets and disaster capitalism.35
A Summary of Conflations. Palin wants to restore America’s honor. She claims that this lost
honor can be reclaimed by christians fighting for free markets, disaster capitalism, and less
government. In fact, she has conflated christianity, free markets, capitalism, and a blind faith in
less government. She warrants that only this fight for honor as defined by her can restore
America’s honor and return democracy to the people. The people, of course, are her kind of
people - true Americans - who just happen to match what she believes in. These people
belong to the in-group. All the rest of us are out. James Bowman describes honor as “the

cultural currency in which the ordinary people… [of a great many cultures], trade, and often one
person’s honorable gain is another’s loss.” Thus, from this perspective, honor is almost always
worth fighting for.36 Only time will tell whether Sarah Palin’s more pagan vison of honor will win
out or whether a new post-Enlightenment, post-modern (even Christian!) vision of honor will.
Author’s Note: Policy makers and average, normal Americans may assume Sarah Palin is
mere distraction to the real business of rational governance and policy-making. My concern
with governance and policy development related to America's wars, which has largely
proceeded from traditional national security and military doctrine, is that policy has been
largely helpless against an inertia of violence. For example, on what basis or rational calculus
might it be claimed that America’s GWOT, of which the Iraq and Af-Pak wars are but a part,
were worth spending $3,000 billion on (latest economic cost estimate)? What is going on here?
This situation is non-rational. It deeply makes no sense.
What strikes me about Sarah Palin is that she also is non-rational. She makes no sense. Yet,
she is wildly popular with a certain segment of American society. Was there a connection
between America’s GWOT that makes no sense and Sarah Palin that makes no sense. That is
how I arrived with a non-consequential deontologically based honor as the driver of these
policies - those put in place by President Bush and those promoted by Sarah Palin in her bid to
influence the presidency of Barrack Obama (and maybe ascend to the presidency herself in
2012 - wouldn’t that be a hoot! That might be more fun than 8-years with our friend, George
Bush).
From a policy perspective, my belief is that analysts, as well as everyday citizens, must first of
all understand the real landscapes policy is to address. Otherwise, policy misses the mark,
badly. I am reminded of U.S. policy in the 1980’s w/re to the Soviet Union, that missed entirely
the Living in the Truth movement in Eastern Europe and thus the policy establishment (not to
mention the Intelligence Community) was not only surprised when the Berlin Wall fell and the
Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we were almost totally unprepared.37
I am concerned that today we face a similar divide (a time before and a time after) that, as a
democratic policy community, we are similarly unprepared to address as we have not factored
sufficiently the sociopolitical dimensions of the time into our policy prescriptions. Its as though
we are attempting to make policy based on assumptions and presumptions that are lingering,
but are no longer valid in the minds of political decision-makers, at least in the U.S.
The policy environment itself, the context within which policy is viewed, is changing radically
and we need to take note and understand this environment more deeply in order to be more

successful in formulating just policy. Maybe Sarah Palin can teach us policy-makers, and
citizens who still care about democracy, and Christians who still have hope something useful.
ENDNOTES:
1 Neverland - a small imaginary island where Peter Pan lives his never-ending childhood with the Lost
Boys. Neverland was first imagined by the Scottish novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie (1860–1937) in
the 1902 adult novel, The Little White Bird.
2The orthodox Christian view of what constitues human assumes that “the intrinsic claim of every
person is to be considered a person.” Ontologically, this defines the basis of justice – that, first of all, our
being is recognized. Without mourning, our being is denied; justice is violated; we become mere
Verdinglichung (things; we are reified; objectified). See Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1960), 60.
3“Antigone, risking death herself by burying her brother against the edict of Creon, exemplified the
political risks in defying the ban against public grief during times of increased sovereign power and
hegemonic national unity” (Referring to Sophocles’ Antigone, 46). But without naming the violence that
permeates our national identity, our communities, and our bodies, we not only enable this violence to
determine the “basis for community,” we become complicit in it (19). All the victims of this violence must
be mourned. Otherwise we loose our humanity; our very relationality to each other and to God that
defines us as persons “for violence is, always, an exploitation of that primary tie, that primary way in
which we are, as bodies, outside ourselves and for one another” (27). Page numbers refer to the essay
by Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics” in Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning
and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 19–49.
4 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, eds., Dana Hollander,
trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 55-6.
5 The notion of self-referentiality is especially important regarding those who claim they are Christian, yet
live into a chauvinism, that at least in part, appears to be based on the “deeply antidemocratic and
dehumanizing hypocrisies of white supremacy”? See Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the
Fight Against Imperialism (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 14. Early Christians (and their Jewish
forbearers) understood that their persons, their selves, were not defined via interiority, but by relationally;
through their relationality with God, with neighbor, and with their environment. There was no existent self
independent of these relationships. Thus, ethically, the only thing that constituted Reality was how one
behaved relationally. It was never enough to personally ascribe one’s membership to the community of
Christians. If one was Christian, it was because one actually acted Christian. The notion that “the
majority of Christians support torture” (or capital punishment, or capitalism, or nationalism, any ism)
would not have made any sense. That is because, by definition, anyone supporting torture (or capital
punishment, or capitalism, or nationalism, any ism) would not, could not, be Christian.

6 By othering, I am referring to the deeply troubling tendency today of setting arbitrary standards for who
is in and who is out. One of the most striking examples of the fruits of this othering is that since 9/11,
America’s global war on terror (GWOT), waged ‘to preserve the American way of life,’ has killed an
estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people, wounded another 250,000 people, and displaced more than a
million people from their homes. The vast majority of those killed, wounded or displaced being women
and children. We know from history that Pax Romana and the “imperial power of Rome [was based] on a
system of ‘political tyranny and economic exploitation,’ founded on conquest and maintained by
violence and oppression” of the other. See Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological
Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 296.
7 See “Consequential and Catastrophic Risks” at http://www.scribd.com/doc/22163392/.

8 See “The Economic Games Behind Nuclear Deterrence” at http://www.scribd.com/doc/20228926/.
9 The USA Patriot Act (2001) and the Presidential Military Order of November 13, 2001 radically erases
the concept of persons and creates a new category of a “legally unnamable and unclassifiable being” of
detainee neither charged with a crime nor POW subject to treatment defined by the Geneva Convention.
See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Kevin Attell, trans. (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 2005), 3.
10Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rorbaugh, Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 121-2.
11 Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005), 85.
12Kenneth Leech, Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985),
388-9.
13From Steven Pollock, “Lecture Two; The Standard Model of Particle Physics,” in Particle Physics for
Non-Physicists: A Tour of the Microcosmos DVD (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2003).
14Essentially, genocidal wars of “human beings… used as God’s instrument of judgment” described
especially in Judges and 1 Samuel in the Old Testament. See Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A
Study in the Ethics of Violence (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7.
15 See Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 262.
16This estimate includes all known tactical (battlefield – suitcase and backpack weapons, atomic land
mines, air-defense warheads, atomic artillery shells, etc.) and strategic (sitting atop missiles aimed at
military installations and cites) nuclear (fission) and thermonuclear (hydrogen fusion) devices in the
inventories of nuclear states: Russia (20,000), U.S. (10,600), China (400), France (350), United Kingdom
(200), Israel (100), India (40), Pakistan (40), North Korea (2). Iran is presently engaged in a nuclear
weapons program and Saudi Arabia is presently debating the option to acquire a nuclear deterrent, but
these states do not yet possess them. See Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) nation reports available at
http://www.nti.org/e_research/ profiles/index.html (accessed 9/09/04).

17The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), run by former U.N. weapons inspector David
Albright, estimates that at the end of 2003 there was a total of 1,855 metric tons of plutonium and 1,900
metric tons of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) globally. It takes ~10 kg. of plutonium-239 or 16-25 kg. of
HEU enriched to ~90 percent uranium-235 (U-235) to fuel a weapon. See ISIS, “Global Plutonium and
Highly Enriched Uranium HEU) Stocks: Summary Tables and Charts (June 30, 2004)” available at http://
www.isis-online.org/global_stocks/summary_tables.html#chart1 (accessed 10/05/04).
18 Personal conversation with a weapons researcher.
19 Kathryn Tanner suggests that “the goods of God’s own life [e.g. honor] are already and forever ours in
Christ by virtue of the fact that God has become one with humanity there. Christ indeed is the way God
has of giving to us – of changing the character of our fundamental property, so to speak, that makes
what we are – whatever we might do, despite ourselves, even while we remain sinners” (66). For “Christ
is the way God comes, not to the righteous and the already blessed, who fully expect their privileges of
moral standing and good fortune to bring with them all the further goods of life, but to sinners in the
midst of their sin, to the poor crushed by burdens of pain and injustice, to all who seem to be owed
nothing” (64). Pages numbers are from Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress,
2005).
20Eric L. Santner, “Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor,” In
Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner, Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 131-2.
21See James Hatley, Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility after the Irreparable (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2000), 119.
22Amarta Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009),
209.
23 Sen, 211.
24 Sen, 213.
25 “Sarah Palinʼs Latest Rogue Gaffe (November 30, 2009) at http://sarahpalintruthsquad.wordpress.com/.
26Nathaniel May, Clint Willis, and James W. Loewen, eds., We Are the People: Voices from the Other
Side of American History (Cambridge, MA; Da Capo Press, 2003), 34.
27See Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Knopf,
2005); Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide (City Lights Books, 1997).
28See “A Hermeneutics of Testimony: Survival Manual for the Camps” at http://www.scribd.com/doc/

12392475/.

29 In the most radical break with this underlying notion of progress, either as determined by God or by
human technology and ingenuity, is Charles Darwin’s (1802-1889) theory of evolution (1859): “It may be
said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the
slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and all that is good; silently and insensibly working,
whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its
organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the
hand of time has marked long lapse of ages.”
Darwin’s theory was itself a blow to William Paley (1743–1805) and British Functionalism in its praise of
“God in the details of design” where we can learn “important aspects of God’s nature and character from
the works of creation:” ‘The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have a designer.
That designer must have been a person. That person is God.’ [“His Evidences of Christianity (1794)
remained a required text for entrance to Cambridge University until the 20th century.”]. Paley used the
image of a fine watch to make two points: (a) complexity: natural history is too complex; chance could
never result in anything so intricate; and (b) design: natural history is adapted “toward a clearly perceived
end.” “The watch implies, by its utility, a mind capable of forethought, design, and construction....‘The
thing required is the intending mind, the adapting hand, the intelligence by which the hand was
directed.’”
Darwin’s, by now irrefutable, objections to Paley’s intelligent watchmaker (resurfacing today as Intelligent
Design - ID) utilizes: (a) Charles Lyell’s (1797-1875) uniformitarianism that posits History occurring over
very long reaches of time. Thus, natural selection can occur by “small, isotropic, nondirectional
variation.” Essentially, trial and error replaces intelligent purpose; (b) natural selection acts at the level of
the individual; and (c) using Adam Smith’s paradox of laissez-faire, it is individual’s struggling for
themselves alone that drives natural selection. [What is interesting is that this principle works in the
natural world but has been demonstrated again and again to be less applicable to the world of
economics.] These are the mechanisms that construct the “entire panoply of vast evolutionary change
by cumulating its small increments through the fullness of geologic time.”
See Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA & London: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 94-5, 123-4, 125, 262-3, 264-5, 596.
30Milton Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago in his Capitalism and Freedom
expressed the idea that “whatever the government does is bad.” See Justin Fox, The Myth of the
Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street (New York: HarperCollins
Publishers, 2009), 93-4.
31 Gene Fama summarizes the Efficient Market Theory: “The primary role of the capital markets is
allocation of ownership of the economy’s capital stock. In general terms, the ideal is a market in which
prices provide accurate signals for resource allocation.... A market in which prices always ‘fully reflect’
available information is called ‘efficient.’” See “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and
Empirical Work,” Journal of Finance (May 1970); 383 quoted in Fox, 104.
32 Fox, 91-2.
33The checkered history and deleterious results of disaster capitalism is well documented in Naomi
Klein’s, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007).
The most recent result of this economic theory is the 2008 financial crisis.

34The most glaring recent instance of markets not pricing systemic risk was costing the price for CDOs
(collateralized debt obligations) - derivatives based on the underlying asset values of mortgages on real
property. Premiums for individual tranches of CDO’s were priced at a risk-adjusted price that assumed
no systemic risk. As the CDO market collapsed, U.S. taxpayers were required to put up approximately
$17,489 billion in reserves (potential future taxes).
Chart from Nomi Prins & Christopher Hayes, “Meet the Hazzards,” The Nation (October 12, 2009) at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091012/prins_hayes based on the analytical work published in Nomi
Prins, It takes a Pillage: behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deal from Washington to Wall
Street, (New York: Wiley, 2009).
35Disaster capitalism is not the only form of capitalism practiced in America currently, but it may be the
predominant form of capitalism practiced by Wall Street and the financial markets. See “Capitalism,
Socialism, and Corporatism” at http://www.scribd.com/doc/19538880/.
36 See James Bowman, Honor: A History (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), 19.
37For a description of a Living in the Truth manifest, see Vaclav Havel, “Spirit of the Earth,” Resurgence,
November-December 1998, 30.

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