March, 2019. The opera in Washington showed Faust, and my party for the evening, the Swedish Embassy's cultural council, had been given access to a VIP lounge during the break.

We saw a lonely table in the corner, champagne on cooling, four glasses lined up.

Three beefy men, who looked exactly as American bodyguards are thought to look like, entered the room.

Between them went their protected objects.

She sat down, sipping her champagne.

"We are moving forward," said the cultural council. "Never in my life," I said.

A few minutes later we had an audience with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the American HD judge who despite his small physical size has become one of the absolute biggest in his guild.

Nobody wanted to go to Sweden

It was when we said the magic word "Sweden" that we were invited to the table.

In the 60's, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of the best in her class at Columbia University.

But she was two more things: Woman and mother.

This made it difficult for her to get a job.

The University of New York started an exchange, and everyone wanted to go to exciting countries.

Nobody wanted to go to Sweden, so Ruth Bader Ginsburg took it.

Here she met a legal profession where one in five was a woman.

In the United States, the figure was four percent.

She met mothers who were judges, and an attitude that careerists did not have to be single and childless.

She learned Swedish to be able to quote Swedish feminists, wrote a book about the Swedish system, and Lund University made her an honorary doctor in 1969. At her death she was an honorary doctor at 29 universities, among them several of the United States' foremost, but the only the honorary doctorate ring she wore was her first - the one from Lund.

Advocate for free abortion

Since she was in Sweden 51 years ago, she has become a champion of women's rights, of the right to free abortion.

For gay rights.

In the 1970s, she played an instrumental role in pointing out gender differences, and she won her - and women's - battles by focusing on men who have been treated unfairly and not given typical female rights.

The male judges could take it, and their judgments paved the way for women to assert the same thing in typically male domains.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was so much more than a chair, but her successes for half a century have been somewhat overshadowed by her death, as discussions are already raging over who will take over her seat in the US Supreme Court, an appointment one has for life.

President Trump and the Republican-clad Senate have less than two months to guarantee a Conservative judge a place among the nine, which would cement Conservative decisions for many decades to come.

Obama was not allowed to nominate a candidate

4.5 years ago, when a conservative HD judge died in February during an election year, the same Republican-led Senate refused to consider then-President Obama's proposal, on the grounds that it was election year and that the people should be allowed to decide.

They do not think so now.

Just hours after the death announcement, talks were underway between President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on how to get a new judge in place as soon as possible.

A Conservative judge could make millions of Americans' dream of abortion prohibited.

The threat of the same could cause Democrats who are not particularly committed to Joe Biden to make the pilgrimage to the polls.

(Or the mailboxes, because the choice due to covid-19 mostly takes place by mail.)

RBG death - more fragmented USA

This year has already seen a federal court, a pandemic, an economic crash, protests and riots over blacks' rights and racism - and an extremely different election campaign between Trump and Biden.

With the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the coming months will be even more divisive for the United States.

It hardly seemed possible.

The uprising that we both saw, Faust, is about God and the devil betting on whether good or evil is stronger in man.

A small group is selected for the experiment.

What is so piquant about the United States in 2020 is that all sides are convinced that they just represent the divine.

And the decisions made by few affect 325 million people.