Political black holes

HERE it is a brand new year. Newspapers and television are still harping on the same old thing, the mess Ronald Reagan got himself into back in 1986. Do reporters and TV anchors really expect the President to keep track of a busybody like Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was dashing around in the White House basement running American foreign policy - and not telling anyone?

Someone pointed out that the president of a bank would not be expected to know about some teller skimming off a few bucks at a lower level. So why should anyone fault a president when his advisers were busy doing deals with other countries, trading arms for hostages, and stuff like that? After all, this President has a ranch to run.

It seems to me, the media could focus on matters far more critical. A lot of serious things are going on in the universe which the press is paying little attention to. For one thing, Ohio State University astronomers recently saw one of those black holes out in space eat a star. It isn't every day a whole star gets sucked into a black hole and swallowed in one gulp like a minnow. Besides, this was considered to be pretty close to Earth, being only 200 million light-years away, which is sort of a near-miss in space language.

Another thing, the sun is getting dimmer. It has lost one-thousandth of its brightness. If this continues to 0.3 percent, we'll all be in a deep freeze. Added to this, there have been a number of little planets careening around the solar system like loose cannon which have nearly collided with Earth. As far as I know, Dan Rather has never mentioned this.

So with big stuff like this going on, why are we still picking on President Reagan? He is a nice guy and is doing every bit as good a job in Washington as he did in the movies. But there will always be dissenters. I suppose if the big things of the universe were reported, there would be analogies drawn by news people, picturing Washington as a black hole, swallowing one political star after another. They would present Ronald Reagan as the sun, getting dimmer day by day. Well, so much for 1987.

There will always be 1988.