Two weeks before bussing up to the Bronx for his 55th college reunion, and then from JFK to Germany and Russia for the rest of June, Ray gave a series of interviews to Regis Tremblay, a colleague from Veterans For Peace and an accomplished documentary maker.
Regis has broken his footage down into three segments: (1) on the media; (2) on Israel’s influence on (otherwise un-understandable) U.S. policy on Syria; and (3) Ukraine.
Below is the link to the first, which runs for 12 minutes. (We will post the other two links in the coming days.) In the first segment, Ray talks about the regrettable but undeniable demise of the Fourth Estate and the happy emergence of a Fifth Estate. To put some flesh on his remarks, he includes a painful personal experience with some longtime friends and classmates from the New York area, who still think that by reading the New York Times they know what’s going on – like in the old days.
Ray had been looking forward to the next five-year reunion with classmates, just two weeks after the interviews with Regis Tremblay. This seems to be what prompted him to describe an earlier experience confronting distinguished Fordham alumnus (now Fordham Trustee) Gen. Jack Keane, at Ray’s 50th reunion of Fordham College five years ago.
In 2011 Keane was celebrating his 45th from Fordham’s Business School and had been asked to give a lecture to our Jubilee class of 1961 and others celebrating another five years away from Fordham (and still alive). All dolled up in Fox News attire and calculating (correctly) that his audience would be malnourished on accurate information, Keane gave an unconscionably alarmist account of the danger posed by Iran, which he claimed was about to get a nuclear weapon. Discomforting as it was to experience his classmates’ reaction to Ray’s speaking truth to power (something not very much encouraged at Fordham back in the day), Ray found the vignette worth telling – as a chilling illustration of the effects of the death of the Fourth Estate on otherwise well educated people. The more so, since Jack Keane played a key role in thwarting a sensible change in the U.S. role in Iraq ten years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
(12 minutes)