http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/david_kipen_on_freedoms_orator_20100624/?ln
Jun 25, 2010
By David Kipen
Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s
By Robert Cohen
Oxford University Press, 544 pages
If Columbia students were marching on Albany this year and a
biography of Mark Rudd had just come out, you could bet the book
wouldn't go unreviewed in the so-called national media. Berkeley has
erupted again, and a fascinating biography of Mario Savioa figure
far more influential than Rudd, and not just because he helped lead a
sit-in at Berkeley four years before the Columbia protestshas just
come out. But its author, Robert Cohen, would have to stage a sit-in
at 42nd Street and 8th Avenue for much of anybody to notice. Could it
be that, for all the supposed decentralization of media in the age of
Twitter, what's left of the commentariat is more Manhattanized than ever?
That would be a shame, because "Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the
Radical Legacy of the 1960s" rescues from creeping amnesia a student
firebrand perhaps second only to Tom Hayden in his rhetorical gifts.
What Hayden did in his epochal Port Huron Statement over a stretch of
weeksgive eloquent voice to a generationSavio did from the top of a
squad car on no sleep. "Freedom's Orator" succeeds in taking us back
to a time when Berkeley students would actually fight not just to
speak freely on campus, but also to "emphasize intensive study of the
classics in intimate seminars." The more things change, apparently,
the more they get completely different.
Mario Savio grew up Sicilian in Queens, an altar boy and a physics
prodigy. He had a paralyzing stammer, which Cohen persuasively argues
made his later leadership in the Free Speech Movement not so much
ironic as deeply personal. Savio loved free speech as maybe only
someone denied it since childhood could. It wasn't till his fairly
banal high-school valedictorian address that he discovered public
speaking didn't compound his disability, but actually seemed to cure it.
For most of his life, Savio had a horror of private, individual
speaking. Fired with the idealism of his work in Mississippi during
the Freedom Summer of 1964, he resisted the cult of personality with
which journalists kept trying to saddle him. In the unpublished
memoir Cohen tantalizingly quotes from, Savio consistently deflects
credit toward his comrades for the movement's success in overturning
UC Berkeley's limits on free speech, and away from himself.
In that sense, alas, Savio got the biographer he deserved. About
Savio's private life, Cohen is discreet to the point of incuriosity.
The only major exception to this reticence comes when Cohen turns up
evidence of Savio's childhood molestation by a relative. Otherwise,
the author checks in on Savio's personal doings only intermittently,
and even then with all the depth and perspicacity of a class notes
entry by a none-too-close friend: Savio "had recently become engaged
to Suzanne Goldberg," we learn in passing, and 13 pages later that
his family "now included Suzanne and their son Stefan."
On the one hand, an aversion to prurience is a desirable quality in a
book about and for serious people, which "Freedom's Orator" most
definitely is. Yet if the personal is politicalas so many of Savio's
co-generationists legitimately arguedthen who we are remains
relevant to what we say, and think, and try to do. Whom we marry, or
don't, and the children we bear, or don't, bear in turn on the ideas
we espouse, and hope to embody. Mario Savio had a mental breakdown
later in life and was institutionalized, only to re-emerge as a
loving though flawed husband, father, teacher and activist. That's a
whale of a story, but, despite all Cohen's research, we glimpse it
only at infrequent intervals, as if on visiting days.
Amid exhaustive accountings of arcane schisms and doctrinal splits,
Cohen can be stingy with some details. We do discover, fascinatingly,
that a viewing of "Becket"the 1964 movie from Jean Anouilh's play,
starring Peter O'Toole as Henry II and Richard Burton as the
troublesome priest pricked by conscienceprobably had an important
influence on Savio's words and ideas atop a police car a couple of
nights later. But other, fetishistic if forgivable, questions nag.
Who christened the Free Speech Movement, anyway? And you don't have
to be a quondam museum curator to wonder: Rusting on what municipal
surplus lot might that fateful police cruiser be found today?
Prophetically, Savio's last campus crusade for justice had less to do
with free speech than with student fees. This year, 36 years after
Savio thrillinglyand effectivelyexhorted his peers to "put your
bodies upon the gears and ... make it stop," UC students have been
demonstrating mostly for the right not to see a good education priced
beyond their reach. Also this year, as in 1964, the kids won. They
dodged a bullet last month in California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's
proposed budget, which balances precariously and fleetingly on the
backs of the poor, the sick and the elderly instead of their own. In
state government, as in the office of any decent book review section,
it's triage every day.
In one sense at least, Schwarzenegger's decision was exactly the
right one. It's a bet on the future of California. If he had
crucified University of California students to spare the needy,
instead of the other way around, the needy would have had no
opportunity to pay the students back. In the years ahead, however,
with libraries, community health centers and other public
institutions slashed to the marrow, these students will have more
than enough opportunities to service their debt of gratitude. Like
Savio in Cohen's imperfect but useful bookthe altar boy who lost God
but found a different callingthey should remember the story of the
thief who was spared. Others will die for the UC class of 2014, just
as Jesus died in place of Barabbas. This is a crime, but it will be a
tragedy only if the victorious students forget how much more they
owe, now, than just student loans.
Thanks to the pitiless Darwinism of YouTube, Savio's legacy primarily
rests on his brief, astonishingly extemporaneous "bodies upon the
gears" speech, delivered right before the Free Speech Movement's
climactic sit-in on Dec. 2, 1964, and included here in a 75-page
appendix of Savio's speeches and writings. In a way, it's a speech
made for YouTube, since it starts out with Savio's fairly extraneous
trash-talking at the expense of the student body weenie up before
him, and winds up with a movie announcement plus his short, almost Ed
Sullivan-style "take it away" intro of Joan Baez. In between, the nut
of his soliloquy is all but made for YouTube's pruning.
Savio gives ragged but eloquent voice to the rage and especially the
pain of a cohort that, in the words of a John Updike poem, did not
yet know it was a generation. "There's a time," he says, unmistakably
wincing, "when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes
you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. ..." Refusing to get
sidetracked by the inadvertent rhyme, he drives on: "... you can't
even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the
gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus,
and you've got to make it stop."
So long as we're discussing Berkeley, one of the last campuses that
still offers a degree in rhetoric, it may be worth uncoiling a last
strand or two of Savio's powerhouse speech. The "bodies upon the
gears" imagery is straight out of Chaplin's "Modern Times," of
course. And "make it stop" becomes the perfect phrase, half rallying
cry and half tantrum, to bring this youthful incantatory litany to a
halt. With it, Mario Saviowho grew up considering the priesthood and
wound up a plaster saint to Cohen, but an enduringly human
inspiration to generations beyond just his ownSavio found the
congregation he was born for.
--
David Kipen is the author of "The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite
of American Film History." Until January 2010, he was the literature
director of the National Endowment for the Arts. He served from 1998
to 2005 as book critic, and before that book editor, for the San
Francisco Chronicle. He lives in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of
Los Angeles and can be reached at kipend@gmail.com.
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