Even with all the eulogic rhapsodizing over the Free Speech Movement’s Mario Savio, whose heart gave out last month after the passage of Prop. 209 (or after the rearrangement of heavy furniture, depending on whose autopsy you believe), Wendy Lesser wrote such a mushy mash note in the December 15 New York Times Book Review, one isn’t certain whether she should have published it or kicked it under his desk and giggled.
Lesser calls Savio “a poet,” “a sainted Dostoyevskyan fool,” “a martyr,” ” the last surviving member of a rare and beautiful species,” even “a dead end in our evolutionary development.” Which is not to diminish Savio’s legacy of casting the die for the modern academy (free expression over education), which unleashed thousands of liberalarts professors to explore then-uncharted disciplines such as gay cinema. But it is with Lesser’s already overstated assessment of Savio’s eloquence that we quibble: “He was the only person I have ever seen . . . who gave political speech the weight and subtlety of literature.”
Excepting, of course, his own “literature,” like this weighty, subtle passage from an essay entitled “Why it Happened in Berkeley”: “The Berkeley students now demand what hopefully the rest of an oppressed white middle class will some day demand: freedom for all Americans, not just for Negroes!” Or this passage from the same essay: “Many of us came to college with what we later acknowledged were rather romantic expectations, perhaps mostly unexpressed at first, about what a delight and adventure learning would be. We really did have unanswered questions searching for words, though to say so sounds almost corny.” Almost corny?
