Iowa

Sometime in July of 1944, the German high command issued orders to the military units fighting in Normandy to break off their attempts to drive the allied invasion back into the sea and instead assume a defensive posture intended to contain the invasion.

Those orders were an admission by the Nazis that they had lost the war, and the questions were now how many lives would be spent to force them to surrender (a colossal number as it turns out) and where would the postwar boundary between the Soviets and the West be.

No one at the time knew it, though Stalin probably figured it out pretty quickly, Churchill soon after, and Roosevelt probably never got it – that day in 1944 was the beginning of the Cold War. The Germans had lost the ability to control their own fate; causes had become effects, and though rivers of blood would still be spilt to settle old issues, a new world had been born.

Harbingers of great events pass unnoticed.

Yesterday there was a great to do in Iowa, the results of which will be pondered, written, and screamed about for days to come. The only thing I know is that none of it means what the ponderers, writers, and screamers think it means, and if some portentous event occurred yesterday, it did not occur in Iowa.