Among the Intellectualoids/Sons of Frankenstein
Evanier, David
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS SONS OF FRANKENSTEIN by David Evanier It was an emotional evening for a few, but not many, present at Columbia University's Wollman Auditorium in mid-November. The...
...We did not choose what happened in Russia, nor did they...
...Savio is asked by a student with a beard and a duffel bag: "You mentioned Nicaragua being a shining example, but how about Cuba, my friend...
...Why can't I just ignore it...
...Two days after seeing Savio and Hoffman, I sat facing an elderly Russian who had survived the Gulag...
...Like all progressive true believers before him, Savio murmurs wisps of sorrow about lapses in countries that have lost a little of their glow in the face of innumerable testimonies about the way they torture their own citizens...
...Here's the story, here's the story...
...We need to judge people by the circumstances they found themselves in...
...There's probably not been a meaner government in all the history of this country...
...Which is why they burn the flag and call America by its real name: imperialist monster...
...murmur people in the audience...
...it will sufficiently accelerate the extinction of the Yankee race . . . make revolution against the rapacious bloodthirsty homicidal gangsters...
...They don't know the game is over...
...Now in Nicaragua...
...I say to them as follows: I say, comrades, if Mr...
...But who was the old man on the stage, the fellow who was bald on top with big clumps of gray hair sticking out from both sides and the back of his head...
...As the older Tyrone brother, Jamie, says to the younger, Edmund, in Long Day's Journey Into Night: "Hell, you're more than my brother...
...She's afraid of missing 'Dynasty...
...I'm an American...
...I have respect for what's happened, but I don't have to be uncritical in order to have respect...
...Savio expresses the belief that "I could not give this speech, not this speech, at the University of Moscow...
...people that don't have power...
...They did the best they could...
...By this he means the language of the "progressive" left, which he now mechanically employs, along with the rhetorical devices of the sixties (sentences end in "okay," and "§11 right...
...An elegant young black man, glowering, steaming visage, black beard, black raincoat, black shoes with pointed toes, red shirt, black tie...
...The time has come we gotta take these Reagandroits on one by one, we gotta kick a little bit of ass...
...And the graying pudgy man with a melancholy air, wearing a red sweater over his swelling stomach, a tweed jacket, tie, and white shirt-could that be Abbie, the wild man I saw strip naked at Fillmore East in the sacred sixties...
...He was brought to Columbia for this comeback by Abbie Hoffman after it was reported in the press that Savio turned up at the 20th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement and wept on the steps of the University of California's Sproul Hall at the rousing reception he received...
...Chjle...
...There is not enough democracy to suit me," he says of the Soviet Union...
...If you look you'll find they have used, their troops exclusively on their own borders...
...they call it a mixed economy...
...I enjoy physics...
...There was "a vicious attack on progressives": They used that Communist angle...
...What's the matter with her...
...Who can dispute such figures...
...He is taking names for next summer's tour...
...He reads from his favorite book, What Difference Could a Revolution Make?, the one that tells the "truth" about Nicaragua, and it is an old refrain: Illiteracy rate- down...
...Savio hints there may have been doubts on his part in the past...
...Infant mortality: down...
...They are now full-fledged progressives, whatever they may have been in the sixties...
...my country is responsible for murdering innocent human beings in Central America...
...They came 200 years ago invented by some European parlor intellectuals...
...He had been a Communist, a true believer, snatched in the night from his family in Moscow and placed in a labor camp in the subarctic...
...That government steals from the lunch money of little black schoolchildren in the USA in order to murder little brown schoolchildren in Nicaragua...
...They got machine-gunned...
...In addition to many of these uninitiated who had heard that the two speakers had been celebrities in the past, the audience consisted of various segments of the scraggly left: some old-time Communists with red apple cheeks from Morningside Heights and the ultra-left grouplets with names like the Sparticists who preface their praises of the Soviet" Union with the phrase "despite a bureaucratic deformation in that country" and talk about their plan for the United States as "putting a stake through the monster...
...Our language had been taken from us...
...The Big Chill...
...I made you: You're my Frankenstein...
...The audience rocks with laughter...
...These could be Savio's thoughts watching this procession of humanity at the microphone, and perhaps will be, in retrospect, in the years to come...
...Sorry, I'm so out of touch...
...A fact...
...They are the underbelly of the speaker's vision-the future members of neighborhood surveillance committees after the revolution, the overseers in labor and "re-education" camps, the guards in psychiatric prisons...
...That's what the revolution did...
...During those years of imprisonment, World War II began.- For many years he was not allowed any communication with the outside world...
...Hoffman conducts tours to Nicaragua...
...He was so thin, he said, that the winds would constantly knock him down and he would fall into the snow...
...A fact...
...He is a stand-up comic: I get lost in capitalism and communism and isms and isms...
...They have been slandered...
...I still am...
...There are announcements of Abbie's slide show of his tour to Nicaragua...
...Savio first reminisces about the Free Speech Movement...
...I believe the world is moving toward a mixed economy...
...You only get the majority when you win...
...Take the socialism we have for the rich and mix it up with the capitalism, the rat race we have for the poor...
...A young man with a scarf flung around his neck grabs the microphone next...
...Mario Savio disappeared...
...a member of the audience responds, and then wild applause breaks loose...
...That's all...
...We need to consider the shoes they had to walk in so many miles...
...Reagan invades Nicaragua, it will become a large wasting ground...
...Okay, but boy, they're gonna pay here on the streets of America...
...He concludes triumphantly: "Okay...
...That's what they got...
...Lennie" curves his hand around the microphone...
...we're moving into the 21st century...
...Students around me were telling their dates who Savio and Hoffman were...
...Whoo...
...So you have to begin to show people they don't have to fight anti-capitalism, they don't have to protect capitalism in the purest form possible, it's not worth protecting...
...Savio ponders this one, and replies: I used to be very, very critical toward Cuba, very critical, okay...
...After all, their premises and conclusions are not really different from his...
...This can probably be charming in small doses but he takes simplicity where it shouldn't go...
...That but is a giveaway: How casually the totalitarian left has been willing, again and again, to experiment with people's lives...
...Savio and Hoffman see Nicaragua as the anti-Vietnam movement of the eighties that can rejuvenate the left...
...I'd just like to see it mix a little in this country...
...He flatters himself...
...And they make him look good by contrast...
...As far back as 1968, Hoffman idealized Fidel Castro (who was standing beside a tank) as looking "like a mighty penis coming to life...
...Soon it is over...
...I respect what they did...
...Rhapsodic applause from some...
...The reason we have a cold war and therefore have these weapons is because our leaders are defending capitalism...
...Savio calls for a broad movement of protest going beyond "anti-intervention" to "anti-capitalism": They want to have a war...
...Even Abbie looks serious...
...And why did they do that...
...But it was Mario himself...
...I'm a freshman...
...Pointy Shoes takes the mike and thanks Savio for his "moderate, sensible, humane, and optimistic" remarks...
...Because, friends, the Soviet Union was the first country where an anti-capitalist revolution succeeded and it wasn't fun to be there...
...The isms to me are all wasms...
...A young lady asked about Savio: "Who is he...
...I cannot, I cannot, and that is the only reason I am here tonight...
...A girl at the head of the line removes her coat, her scarf, combs her hair, looks hastily around the audience, and departs down the aisle, shouting, "Oh, I hate you all...
...He could give this speech at the University of Moscow any time he wanted to...
...And then I started thinking about Cuba...
...He is not a stupid man...
...He says that in the sixties he read all of Orwell and even mentions Homage to Catalonia, a book whose meaning he has surely forgotten, but Orwell is okay even with this audience now...
...The words that stay in the memory are Savio's: "I hope it's democratic, that's what I'm going for, but let me say it's very different from what Reagan is going for, by a long shot...
...Would they censor these remarks about the USSR...
...Then Mr...
...There are not as many of us now, but you know, there weren't that many at the beginning of the war in Vietnam...
...I don't understand any of this...
...The subject, "Beyond the Big Chill: Resistance and Survival...
...He received no news about the progress of the war...
...I cannot, I cannot watch that on the tube...
...As he gets chuckles, he gets happier and more excited: All these people think the system's hot stuff, maybe it will work one more time...
...Hoffman is a dangerous clown: We're talking about people that have power...
...They wiped out eight million Indians to make this country free and democratic...
...The savant of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the sixties, Mario Savio, made his first "major speech" in seventeen years...
...He felt that the Nazis must have won the war and were running the camp...
...He looked like a faculty member eager to make it with the coeds...
...Savio takes questions from the audience...
...Chile played by the numbers...
...It's clear he isn't going to keep that tone for long, and off he zooms: My fellow Latin Americans cannot be belabored with complex theoretical questions...
...They file to the microphone: a Lennie lifted from Of Mice and Men-orange knit cap, huge stomach sticking out of a Che Guevera T-shirt, darting eyes...
...He spoke to me of 1937, a time when the American progressive left, whose decline Savio laments, was in its heyday, inspired by the example of the Soviet Union...
...And I'll tell you what changed my mind about that...
...That's what it did...
...A friend would unwrap the scarf that was protecting his own head, tie it around the waist of his thin comrade, and walk forward so that the man could be kept upright...
...It was okay, he says, but it lacked something: language...
...I have family responsibilities...
...That's a fact...
...But the newest progressive place-and this year it is Nicaragua-is without flaws: "This is the real shining city on the hill-this is irresistible...
...And we should not do anything but burn the flag and not do anything but put this country down for what it is and the way most of the people of the world look at it...
...Savio's whereabouts for seventeen years were a mystery, although Hoffman explained that "as often happens in a non-elitist movement like ours, you become famous and you don't know how to deal with it...
...What other explanation could there be for the tortures he was enduring?ere be for the tortures he was enduring...
...When I see people like Gromyko-coming back, seems like he never dies-has to talk to people like Reagan and Shultz [laughter...
...I'm not as critical...
...Halfway into his speech, Savio brings down the house talking about Nicaragua: Why can't we just ignore it...
...Hoffman and Savio represent one of the two directions the early leaders of the New Left have gone: electing to work within the system like Jane Fonda's assemblyman husband, Tom Hayden, or hardening their view of capitalism, as Hoffman and Savio have done...
...My field is physics...
...They are all received by Savio with deference and seeming moderation...
...He says things blithely that could almost go over on the "Tonight" show...
...A shining example for twenty years...
...Adult education: up...
...it's built on blood...
...His beanstalk face and body were those of a.Holocaust survivor, and his heroism, humor, and wit defied my understanding...
...He twists shyly as he mumbles, his T-shirt rises gradually and exposes his tummy...
...All right...
Vol. 18 • February 1985 • No. 2
