Sherry Chandler

Here’s an interesting observation from BagnewsNotes:

What rekindled my interest, however, was the buzz on Monday over the coal industry’s sponsorship of at least three CNN debates. If you missed it, the coal industry has created a front group called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) which has a $35 million ad budget in states with primaries and caucuses to snow the public on the idea of “clean coal.”

What is most disturbing, however, is the fact that, in those three debates — including the one Monday night in South Carolina, as well as the CNN/YouTube debates in Nevada and Florida — not one question was asked about global warming.

The Bag asks some interesting questions about corporate sponsorship. Read it all.

“…Shall we now talk about something else?”

“Willingly. What subject?”

“Poetry,” [Aziz] said, with tears in his eyes. “Let us discuss why poetry has lost the power of making men brave. My mother’s father was also a poet, and fought against you in the Mutiny. I might equal him if there was another mutiny. As it is, I am a doctor, who has won a case and has three children to support, and whose chief subject of conversation is official plans.”

“Let us talk about poetry.” [Fielding] turned his mind to the innocuous subject. “You people are sadly circumstanced. Whatever are you to write about? You cannot say, ‘The rose is faded,’ for evermore. We know it’s faded. Yet you can’t have patriotic poetry of the ‘India, my India’ type, when it’s nobody’s India.”

—E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harcourt, Brace, 1922)