Mario Savio's legacy
LABASH, MATT
Mario Savio's Legacy by Matt Labash His chin dimpled enough to insert a bullhorn, his brow furrowed enough to seat two co-eds, Mario Savio was just a Berkeley sophomore when he gave life to the...
...You've got to put your body upon the gears...
...And if they are speaking of the usurpation of a classical liberal-arts core curriculum and the early taste test of what | passes today for free ^ speech on campus, S we all indeed owe him a debt—not just leading academic lights like Angela Davis, the Panther and Communist vice-presidential candidate who is now a professor of "the history of consciousness" (Huey Newton got his Ph.D...
...Savio departed the FSM in 1965 after his arrest, and the movement only limped along for a brief while without him...
...And today...
...Well, one out of two ain't bad...
...Which is not to make light of the passing of the man whose actions sparked ten years of civil unrest and thirty years of nihilistic grievance groups that have made university curricula their playthings...
...But his demise isn't as tragic, friends say, as what might have been if he hadn't taken flight so early in the first go-around...
...But Savio and the FSM opened the floodgates for the politicization of education and showed the one True Way to both the anti-war and women's-lib movements...
...Even German radical Rudi Dutschke, who encouraged reform via "the long march through the institutions," would have had to admonish him to get on his merry way...
...There are just too many nonsense hours spent by American students, hours to 'do' much as one 'does' time in prison," he wrote, railing against Berkeley president Clark Kerr...
...As Peter Collier, former FSM'er and expatriate leftist, says, "Savio had a Kennedyesque quality about him in that he was never there to see the destruction and destructive consequences of the kind of movement he helped give birth to, and somehow that allows him to retain, in this perverse way, a kind of innocence...
...He had a moral force that almost glowed," said the San Francisco Chronicle...
...He suddenly pushed it against his butt...
...Mario Savio's Legacy by Matt Labash His chin dimpled enough to insert a bullhorn, his brow furrowed enough to seat two co-eds, Mario Savio was just a Berkeley sophomore when he gave life to the Free Speech Movement by shouting from the roof of a police car in Sproul Plaza in 1964...
...And if that's not a course of study you wish to pursue, try Yale's "Lesbian, Gay and Transgender Cinema," uC Santa Cruz's "Queering the Renaissance," Duke's "Gay Abandon," Harvard's "Fetishism," or Swarthmore's "The Bodies That Surround us"—a class whose text is composed in a child's voice, with children's book illustrations of a naked man holding a naked boy's hand...
...Such a demeanor is not unusual among Savio's peers, according to Laura X—former FSM'er, friend of Savio's, and current head of the Women's History Library in Berkeley...
...Hearts were certainly heavy out West...
...While Savio envisioned back in '64 having "real classes up there...
...in the same field...
...His prose, however, would take a hash pipe and some jug wine to plow through...
...I don't know anybody who lived through those times who wasn't depressed," says X, who dropped her last name to protest women's being "legally owned" by their fathers and husbands...
...and "freedom schools," he could not have envisioned just how free his old cronies—the ones who failed to burn down the academy but now set its agenda—would get...
...He had been teaching logic and math to remedial students at Sonoma State University for the last three years when he died...
...I was all shook up...
...You can now say anything you want, as long as it doesn't violate one of the nation's 400-plus anti-prejudicial speech codes ordered up by the very same people who burned the flag in the 1960s...
...The 1994 elections served as the impetus for his political reanimation...
...He never cheapened the nostalgia currency with embarrassing public lapses, like when Jerry Rubin sold securities or Bobby Seale sold barbecue cookbooks or Bobby Rush sold insurance or Eldridge Cleaver sold jeans with codpieces (and later sold out to The Man by becoming a Republican...
...At the 20th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Savio recalled: "It has remained a brilliant moment when . . . we were both moral and successful...
...With typical understatement, he decided that "the country has been taken over by barbarians" and consequently battled against California's anti-affirmative-action initiative alongside relevant cultureburghers like the famous-for-being-famous hippie Wavy Gravy...
...private school Sidwell Friends, and attending the Italian Communist party convention...
...They put Savio's body in the ground when that same heart stopped on November 6. Some say fibrillation got him, while others claim his heart was broken by the victory of the California Civil Rights Initiative...
...My hand disappeared...
...And those are just the extracurricular activities...
...Instead, he suffered an emotional breakdown, had a busted marriage, worked odd jobs from bookstore clerk to bartender, and all the while remained his usual chipper self...
...And if you don't like what other people say, as Berkeley students didn't recently when a pro-CCRI editorial appeared in the Daily Californian, you can steal all 23,000 copies and go unpunished...
...It would be in the running as 'worst century' in the last twenty...
...He spoke for us in a way that the folks later on did not," says Laura X. "He could've led the '60s in a way where it would not have degenerated into vicious-ness," agrees former FSM'er Kate Coleman, though she expresses some skepticism about X's credentials ("I barely remember her from the movement...
...Instead of slumbering through old bores like Plato and Aquinas, one is liberated to take "Mathematics for the Environment" at the university of oregon, or Georgetown's "Prison Literature," where the authors are all inmates...
...He died the day after CCRI passed, and National Public Radio said his struggle against it might have done him in...
...The Vietnam War not only took a toll on the people that went and came back and beat up their wives, but also the people here...
...By way of recovery, Savio went on extended sabbatical...
...After what he described as "15 years of rest," in the mid-1980s Savio started making like a good aging radical—railing against what he thought was a brewing Vietnam in Central America, singing folksongs at his son's graduation from the chi-chi D.C...
...Where you once had to get permission just to pamphlet at Berkeley, you have in recent years been allowed to: go to class naked, get credits for talking about sex, conduct Breast Freedom Parades, and riot, loot, and overturn and set ablaze a firetruck because "it was springtime" and students had "been studying for months and had been oppressed...
...We'll never recover from it...
...Where did my hand go...
...Like another Queens-bred Mario who coasted for many years off of one great speech (Cuomo in '84), Savio cemented his historical standing as the leader of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), whose protests brought an end to Berkeley's political-speech restrictions and its policy of acting as parent to its students (in loco parentis, to use the now-archaic term...
...He symbolized the possibilities in all of us, to resist becoming cogs in somebody's machine," said fellow student radical Tom Hayden, now a cog in the machine of the California State Senate...
...Because of his self-imposed exile, he remained fondly remembered and unsullied...
...After retiring from the FSM and most other New Left action, Savio was occasionally spotted on the periphery but managed to make scarce before things spiraled out of control...
...Moral and successful...
...After re-enrolling at Berkeley in 1970, he dropped out again, later attending classes sporadically in different schools before finally getting a bachelor's in physics in 1984 and getting his master's some years later...
...The sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, too, can now protest just about anything, and do!—from long cafeteria lines at Burbank High, to recruitment for Playboy's "Girls of the Ivy League" issue at Dartmouth, to the non-departmental status of Chicano Studies at UCLA (which they denounced by breaking windows with chairs...
...This has been a terrible century," he told the Washington Post in 1984...
...Conducting the original sit-in and protesting the banishment of political activities from campus, he raged against the university machine...
...Nor was he present when the so-called revolution actually came to resemble one, as manifested by the pistol whippings and pipe bombs of the Black Panthers and the Weathermen...
...It "makes you sick at heart," he cried...
...His fierceness was equally effective whether he was being oratorical or occlusive (he once bit a cop on the thigh...
...A good part of the reason for the rapturous eulogies to Savio is that he was AWoL for the sectarian cat-fights and narcissistic implosion of the New Left in the late '60s and early '70s...
...There is little doubt about the power of Savio's legacy," rhapsodized the San Francisco Chronicle...
...The new canon is perfectly encapsulated in a single "Social Justice" class at Michigan, where the aim is to "learn about racism, homophobia, sexism, rape, incest, domestic violence, eating disorders, substance abuse, the AIDS crisis and teen pregnancy," as one works to bring about "changing the lives of people of color, women, gay men, and lesbians...
...Painfully shy and disdainful of media attention, he could never become one of the slick Sammy Glicksters like Hayden...
...Kerr dismissed the racket as a "ritual of hackneyed complaints"—though he hadn't seen anything yet...
...The caption reads: "The guy took me home and at one point grabbed my arm and said make a fist...
...Elsewhere, Savio was compared to Thoreau, some Nobel laureates, Abe Lincoln, and Jesus, in descending order of importance...
...and you've got to make it stop...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 11
