I’ve always worried that something was missing from my small-town education.
Now I know: Our teachers never told us about the Revolutionary War’s airport battles.
Donald Trump did. Reading his 4th of July address from a Teleprompter, he praised our revolutionary soldiers: “Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over airports.”
That has brought reactions from historians and such, who are convinced there were no airports back then. There are several possible explanations:
1) Aides have been wrong in their efforts to get Trump to stick to a prepared script. The man simply doesn’t read that well. Or …
2) He really thinks there were airports back then. Maybe in rich-boy school — unlike small-town Wisconsin school — you don’t have to learn anything. You take the basic classes in colonialism (a how-to course) and ethics (how-not-to), then go home and demonize your nanny. Or…
3) Maybe we should give our founding fathers (and Trump) more credit.
History says the first wartime use of balloons for military observation was in France in 1794. By 1873, Jules Verne had a fictional character (shown in this movie scene) taking his balloon around the world in 80 days.
Maybe George Washington and his men foresaw that. Rather than take a chance, they manned the air and seized all the future sites of airports.
Let’s be glad they did. I’d hate to go to O’Hare or Dulles or JFK and have to pay some tea tariff to a snobby British guy.