4 -- PORT PERRY STAR -- Tuesday, July 31, 1984 | comments editoria chatterbox by Cathy Robb UNWORTHY WORTHINGTON Peter, Peter, Peter, what are we going to do with you' You're not going to win the next election, you're go- ing to bore Broadview-Greenwood to the polls. And if -you don't bore them to the polls, you'll bore them to death. And if you don't stop travelling from one riding to the next, speaking to Tory associations, that have nothing to do with you, you'll bore the whole country silly. Just look at me. Why don't you go back to the Toronto Sun where you belong and leave politics to people who know better? It was fine when you were editor of Toronto's smut- tiest newspaper. You shot straight from the hip, firing your gutsy editorials at the biggest guns in the coun- try. Your words held no mercy for folks like Pierre Trudeau and Toronto ate it up. People read your editorials faithfully, agreeing or disagreeing but always reading and always admiring. The average joe liked you because you were saying all the same things he was thinking. So when you made a stab for the Tory candidate position in the last provincial election, and lost, people made a big fuss over you. A big enough fuss to send you into the election anyways, as an independent candidate. And nobody wins elections as an independent can- didate these days. You gotta have a party machine backing you to get anywhere, right? Well, yeah, right. But you almost won. You came that close to winning Broadview-Greenwood and you scared the beejeebers out of the other candidates. You were so popular. So colourful. By far the most exciting candidate of the lot. If I had lived in Broadview- Greenwood, I would have voted for you, no probs. But I wouldn't vote for you now, no way. Now that I've seen you in action, I'd rather vote for a Rhinoceros candidate than Peter Worthington. As one fellow journalist put it, "'Can you imagine a Parliament full of Peter Worthingtons?" No, thank you. Last Wednesday night you were the featured guest speaker at Allan Lawrence Night, er, the Durham- Northumberland Progressive Conservative Association nomination meeting, held at Clarke High School in Newcastle. Al Lawrence was acclaimed, natch, and gave a relatively short but fiery thank-you speech. The Tories in attendance cheered lovingly, sending their man into his fifth election in a row. And then it was your turn, Peter, to do your job as guest speaker and entertain the crowd. This was the moment every journalist in the joint was waiting for. There were some seven or eight reporters in the auditorium, more than I've ever seen before in this riding in one spot at one time. A few of them admitted that half the reason they were there was to see Peter Worthington, former Toronto Sun editor and present Tory candidate in Broadview-Greenwood, do his thing. It was rather pathetic in a way. All these young reporters waiting to hear their guru-turned-politician, waiting to hear any advice he might inadvertently have to offer, waiting to see the fire and brimstone editorial writer in action. We were disappointed. Never in all my days as a reporter have I heard: such rhetoric over so little. You must have rambled on for nearly 45 minutes, Peter, about Russian history and the Soviet threat and T-shirts with 'God Bless The Kremlin" written on them. "The Soviet Union is a bully and we have to learn to stand up to him," you said at one point, the only clear- cut statement in a confusion of rambling. Which is all very interesting if you're a university student listening to a history professor's lecture. But we weren't students, Peter, and you're not a professor. So we all fell asleep about halfway through your lesson. Not just the reporters, everybody in the room. What did all this stuff about the Soviets have to do with us, the people of Durham-Northumberland, or the election campaign for gosh sakes? When people like Allan Lawrence, Liberal candidate Darce Campbell and NDP Roy Grierson are talking mainly about the economy, possibly the biggest issue of the campaign, where do you get off giving Russian history lessons? I mean, you're entitled to talk about whatever you want. But do you want to win the election or not? Maybe you said it best. "I still feel like I'm mixing my roles as journalist and a politician. Dalton Camp is convinced I'm going through mid-life crisis," he said, and then added later, "If I'm not elected, I'm still a journalist, I guess." Why don't you do us all a favour, Peter, and go back to journalism and stay there. Forget politics. They say that some people are better able to ex- press themselves on paper than in person. I think you're one of those people. A Paradox An American Air Force General estimates that the United States could spend as much as $26 billion bet- ween 1985 and 1989 on development of the so-called Star War weapons and defense capabilities. If the Americans are spending this amount of money, it is only fair to assume that similar sums will be spent by the Soviets as they try to stay neck and neck in the race to develop new weapons for use in outer space. : Some of the systems now being tested and developed are right out of the movie Star Wars: particle beam accelerators to destroy missiles; sensors to detect the difference between a decoy missile and the real McCoy; laser beams fired from the ground to seek out and destroy missiles already in flight. Early in June, the American military was successful in a test whereby a missile was shot down by another missile at tremendous speeds. It was likened to hitting one bullet with another. With relations between Russia and the United States at an all-time low, the race for space is gaining in momentum. One American military expert says the space wars technology may have the potential to render conventional nuclear weapons obsolete. It wasn't too many years ago that people were say- ing that the development of the atomic bomb would do the same for conventional weaponry. Just how far can mankind go in the development of new technology for weapons? It seems that not even the sky is the limit. Will all this be the saving grace for planet earth, or its ultimate destruction? Meanwhile, the very latest in technology of another kind was at work over the weekend as a medical team of more than 40 people at the Hospital for Sick Children was successful in surgery to separate Siamese twins from Burma. The two children, who had been joined at the ab- domen from birth, are still in critical condition and are not out of the woods yet. But the mere fact that this kind of surgery could even be contemplated is nothing short of a miracle. Two human beings have been give a fresh chance to lead a relatively normal life, thanks to the skill of the medical team and the advances made in medical science and technology. It is a beweildering and frightening paradox that mankind is able to harness science and technology for the advancement and improvement of life on this planet, yet at the same time is moving ahead with weaponry that has the potential to destroy all life on earth. We marvel and shudder at the opposite directions science is taking us. And we wonder just how much longer planet earth can continue to balance on the edge of destruction. Spoil Sports The Olympics opening ceremony on Saturday was pure Hollywood, all glitz and glamour and just exactly what everyone expected from sunny California. Most people enjoyed the spectacle but the reviews from Communist countries around the world weren't so favourable. Soviet-bloc countries bitterly criticized the event as "the worst of Hollywood' while Swedish newspapers praised it as an "unbeatable show." In China, hundreds of millions of Chinese watched the grand opening on television, the first time such an event has been transmitted live to the world's most populous country. Yet the main Cuban Sunday newspaper said the opening ceremonies bored the 90,000 spectators. "The show mounted in Moscow (in 1980) was 100 per cent better than that of Los Angeles,' the official Juventud Rebelde (rebel youth) newspaper said. The paper added the three-hour spectacular presented a "gross falsification' of American history, ig- noring what it called the massacres of Indians, the steal- ing of land from Mexico and the enslavement of the blacks. Really, we shouldn't be surprised. It's the same old _story about the fox and the sour grapes. What they can't have, or chose not to have, they criticize. It's the same way a child would react when told he or she can't attend a birthday party. The only difference is the Soviets could have attend- ed this birthday party if they had wanted, but they just didn't like the house where the party is being held. President Ronald Reagan said after the ceremony in a television interview that the Games have a role to play in world peace, and that he was "'disturbed" by the absence of the Soviets. However, he noted, "They are the losers in this." How right he is. RT ET EA TRIE Doe EA ML irl nn, mel mai NI A w 1 AR 4005 14, FAH