Le Board d'Hover!

Remember that time we went to the moon?
That was 50 years ago. Now we're inventing
fried chicken and Cheeto sandwiches.

As if we needed another indicator of America's declining status as a nation of innovators, yesterday the French military showed off the latest in menacing, armed and faceless figures hovering over the populace in a grim portent of the dystopic future to come. Yup, they've got hoverboards. Not those gyro-stabilized motorized skateboards that they try to pass off as hoverboards, but actual hoverboards. Ok, let me walk that back a little, it's more like a jetpack, but still. Advantage: France.

Yes, he's a grown-ass man who still
calls himself Franky, but then he
did invent a hoverboard so shut up.

I mean look at this. Did you look at that? Well, you should, because stills don't quite capture the je ne sais quoi of this thing. At the country's Bastille Day celebrations, Zapata CEO Franky Zapata flew over the gathered crowd on his company's flyboard. It's a sort of chunky, gas-powered hover board/jet pack that can go up to ninety miles per hour and reach altitudes of three thousand feet. And for reasons still unclear, Zapata was brandishing an assault rifle. Wait-wha? Yeah, I guess it had something to do with flexing French military muscle, I mean, our idiot President was so impressed by last year's Bastille Day military parade that he wasted millions of dollars trying to out do it (he failed, unspectacularly), but still, a rifle? 

I don't want to tell the French Military how to propagandize at a crowd, but it seems like he could have whipped up a similar nationalistic fervor just waving a French flag or some thing.

Pictured: Franky Zapata soaring magestically over the crowd,
waving his assault rifle about as if to say: "I can end you at any moment."

"Zat racist orange goon is going to how you
say, lose his merde? When he see zees!"

-President Macron

Wait...you don't suppose...could this whole thing be an hoax? Like, I'm not saying that the footage was faked. I 99.9% buy that this is a lunatic French jet ski enthusiast (no really, he is) turned inventor zipping around on a flying footstool of his own design, but part of me wants to believe this is French President Emmanuel Macron trolling Donald Trump. Like, he saw that Salute to America bullshit and is trying to trick him into thinking that France has mastered jetpacks so that he'll try to one up him next year. Probably with lasers.

Anyway, as much as I'd like to believe that Macron just screwing with Trump, the flyboard is almost certainly real, and I suppose it's only a matter of time before flying French Sky Troopers® invade America, nationalize healthcare and vastly improve the quality of our bakeries. And really, if I'm being honest, I'm looking forward to it.

Above: one of our future French overlords seen here brandishing
 the very pastries with which she will one day enslave us all.