The bipolar days are here, half the planet at its farthest remove from sunlight and warmth, the other half engulfed by fires and some of the hottest days ever recorded.

We live by laws that have no control over the great certainty of the earth: that it spins on a tilted axis, and this week cast one sphere mostly in darkness and the other in light. The great uncertainty, the fragile construct of civilization, had a solstice of sorts in the nation’s capital on Wednesday. It was a fine day for the Constitution.

People are capable of doing extraordinary things in the season of inertia and gloom. The Continental Army of 1777 built a winter camp of 12,000 stragglers just 18 miles from British-occupied Philadelphia. Many of the desperate and the cold at Valley Forge would eventually defeat the mightiest empire on earth. Two thousand others would not see the springtime.

Seventy-five years ago this month, an army of kids in thin jackets and shredded boots faced down the last big western thrust of the Nazi war machine in the frozen Ardennes forest. For Americans, the Battle of the Bulge was the bloodiest in the war against the greatest evil of the 20th century.