Listics

Of course there is already a Churchill Airport in Churchill, Manitoba (Polar Bear Capital of the World), but it’s named after the town which is named after the river which is named after John Churchill, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company from 1685 to 1691. I’m not aware of an airport named after Winston Churchill. If John Foster Dulles gets an airport… if National Airport has been somehow re-named for America’s first senex, indeed if John Wayne (who never showed his teeth) can have an airport named after him (albeit in Orange County, perhaps as distant from the common reality as Hudson’s Bay) it only seems fair that the old divider himself should have an airport.

The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American democracy. For with this primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. As you look around you, you must feel not only the sense of duty done, but also you must feel anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement. Opportunity is here now, clear and shining, for both our countries.

Charles de Gaulle even has an airport named after him. Hell, in a fit of passionate remorse they even re-named Idlewild for a dead head of state, so I don’t see why Winston Churchill shouldn’t have an airport.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

If it hadn’t been for Winston, Reagan wouldn’t have had a well defined evil empire to conquer and hence no airport. If it hadn’t been for Winston most of the uranium extracted by the British mining companies from distant deserts would have remained in the ground, unprofitably ticking away the half lives of the death dealing plutonium within. The whole idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as a strategic posture might never have been developed.

In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.

If Winston hadn’t planted the seed, would McCarthyism have flourished? We owe so much to the old reprobate, surely we could find an airport somewhere on this globe to rename in his honor — perhaps Entebbe?