LET US NOW PRAISE  FAMOUS . . . WOMEN

"Let us now praise famous men," says Ecclesiastes.

And then divides the group in two.

Between . . . 

"All th[o]se [who] were honored in their generations, and were the glory of their times" 

And . . . 

Those who "have no memorial", "perished, as though they had never been",  but "whose righteousness hath not been forgotten"

The former "have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported." The latter find "glory" in "their seed", their children, "the people [who] will tell of their wisdom".

So . . . 

When the history of 2022 is written, who will we praise?

Here are two of my candidates.

The Queen

There is only one we remember today and only one we are likely to remember a hundred years from now -- Elizabeth II.  

For most of us, the numeral -- the actual number designating her as the second -- is beside the point.  In fact, that it is beside the point may actually be the point.  Because she succeeded and became famous, and justly so, in spite of her lineage rather than because of it.

There are a number of facts about the just-departed Elizabeth that cannot be contested.

One is that she became queen at a point in world history when monarchy was more or less dead as a form of any real government.  

Like the four British monarchs before her, she had no power.

But unlike them, she also did not pretend to have any.  

In the 19th century, Queen Victoria was empress of a realm on which the sun never set by virtue of the British fleet. In the 18th, George III lost colonies by influencing policy and retaining control over the appointment of his  ministers.  Elizabeth, however, could not realm an empire, appoint a minister, advocate a policy, or even express an opinion.  

Unlike her predecessors, she also strode the altar of monarchy more or less alone.  

Of those monarchs who were left by 1952 when she became Queen, only the British pretended to truly exalt theirs. And even that had the ring of hypocrisy to it.  An emotional embrace of symbol was the gauzy lens through which the country hid its obvious decline. Though Churchill, her first of fifteen  prime ministers, had famously said "I have not become the King's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," that is exactly what he did.  In their dreams, only Elizabeth's grandeur allowed the British to pretend otherwise.

Lacking official or legal power, however, Elizabeth still exercised it.  

She did so by squaring many circles.

She believed in duty at a time when the very notion became suspect.  But she did not confuse duty with progress or allow duty to impede it.  Home-schooled in a way she thought stifling and dangerous in its lack of preparedness for the world she would enter and symbolically rule, she made sure her own children were not similarly handicapped.

Prince (now King) Charles graduated with a degree from Cambridge.

Because even symbols should be smart.

Over time, she came to regret having forbidden royal unions in the name of regal ecclesial authority and thus, by example at least, showed that those whose station in life supposedly proceeds from God must nevertheless refrain from confusing the deistic source with its human occupant. In the name of peace in her own home, she allowed her children, and most importantly the one who would succeed her, to divorce and thus pulled the Church she ruled -- and the monarchy she preserved, -- into the 20th century.  

In the name of peace abroad, she shook the hands in 2012 of those who had killed members of her own family. And of those who had wanted to kill her. She knew her gesture would solidify the Irish peace process. In that same vein in 2011, she opened her speech at a state dinner in Dublin Castle by speaking in Irish -- "A Uachtarain, agus a chairde" ("President and friends").  

Mary McAleese, the Irish President sitting at her table, was speechless.

"Wow", she said.

And then repeated it two more times.

Over the centuries, many are the Irish reduced to tears by an English monarch.

None, however, had ever been reduced to silence.

Alla Pugacheva

Alla Pugacheva is a 73-year-old Russian woman.  

According to The New York Times, she is also  "Russia's defining 20th-century pop star".  

She has 3.4 million Instagram followers and this past Sunday she told them that Putin's war in Ukraine had turned Russia into a "pariah" state resulting in the "deaths of our boys for illusory goals".  Her husband is a comedian who was previously added to Russia's  foreign agents register because he too had criticized Putin's war. In her Instagram post, she called him a true patriot and challenged Putin to add her to that register as well.

Pugacheva is a big deal in Russia. 

She burst onto the Russian pop scene a half century ago and has been honored by both Putin and his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.  In 2014, Putin awarded her an Order for Merit to the Fatherland, and in 2019, Russia's Channel 1 provided wall-to-wall coverage of her 70th birthday. 

Though other public figures have criticized Putin's war, she has by far the biggest following. She has sold over 250 million records.  And her fan base includes older Russians who as a group  have been more or less silent on Putin and his war but now may wake up.

This is also not her first brush with dissent.  

When Mikhail Gorbachev died recently, she praised him for allowing freedom and rejecting violence as communism evaporated in the late '80s.  Inasmuch as Putin has decried the break-up of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century" and "a genuine tragedy", these undoubtedly were the characteristics in the last Soviet president most detested by the current Russian one.

With Pugacheva, Putin is flummoxed

She is too big to arrest.

But too big to ignore.

Earlier this month, a Kremlin spokesman said that Pugacheva was still on Russia's side even though her husband had criticized the war.  On Sunday, however, a senior lawmaker took to social media to claim that she "had lost touch with reality."  "She will no longer find support among decent Russian people," said the lawmaker, "We will win without her songs."

With 250 million records in the hands of Russians across the country's eleven time-zones, however, that may not be an option.

Three days after Pugacheva's revolt, and in recognition of the failure of his policy thus far, Putin called for a "partial mobilization" that would press an additional 300,000 men into military service.  In response, there were immediate protests throughout the country, with over 1,200 arrests in 38 cities.  There has also been a surge in requests for one-way flights out of Russia, almost certainly in order to flee any mobilization order.  Meanwhile, at the UN, President Biden gave no quarter.  "A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council invaded its neighbor," said Biden . Though Putin's "war is about extinguishing Ukraine's right to exist," Biden was adamant on 60 Minutes only days before.  Putin, he said, "is not gonna succeed."

Pugacheva is  Russia's version of Liz Cheney.  

Cheney is risking it all on the bet that the United States cannot survive Donald Trump's version of fascism, and Pugacheva is risking it all on the bet that her country cannot survive the type of fascism Putin is practicing.  

Putin's is no doubt worse.

But not because Donald is a better person than Vladimir. 

Trump is hamstrung by American institutions.  Here, the Congress, the Courts, and the free press still function.  Trump, of course, is hell-bent on making those institutions dysfunctional, and his chosen tactic is to brainwash enough Americans into believing his lies so that they themselves  accept his putsch and render those institutions powerless to remove or restrain him if he re-gains the White House.

For us, therefore, Putin is a cautionary tale.  He already operates in a state without limits on his power.  There is no free speech or free press. He has jailed or killed any political opponents. The Duma and the courts have rubber-stamped his presidency for life and his war policy. 

Pugacheva knows it has happened there.

And Cheney knows it can happen here.

So, with a nod to -- and perhaps a correction of -- Ecclesiastes . . .

Let us now praise famous . . .

Women.

Britain's last monarch.

The hushed but effective courage of . . .

Few words.

And Russia's Liz Cheney.

The loud but dangerous courage of . . .

Many.