At UC-Berkeley, the "Free Speech Movement" coalesced; eventually one Mario Savio became by consensus it's most articulate spokesman. The originating impetus was ~ the presence of military recruiters on Campus and the prohinition of signs of protest ie 'free speech'. D'Oh..

Imagine if you can: 1964, Vietnam ramping up - and precisely as Iraq:
No Public Dialogue re the "Domino Theory" and our saving of these people from Godless Communism\ufffd by killing millions of them.. cha cha cha

When a group filed into Sproul Hall one afternoon (to sit.. 'occupy' - not to trash = very well self-policed) and remained there.. late that night, the Chancellor called in the CA Highway Patrol to expel them (urged-on, perhaps threatened-on, by one Ronald Reagan, CA Governor).

The report of the methods employed, mentioned in this small article - is as I recall, also. This is the sidebar: [link|http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/12/23/DDGD5AFGNK1.DTL| 'J'Accuse'].

Ralph J. Gleason's 'J'accuse'

Ralph J. Gleason

Forty years ago this month, Ralph J. Gleason spoke out eloquently in support of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. At the time, there wasn't great support for the movement in the press, but that didn't stop Gleason from speaking his mind. The following column originally appeared on Dec. 9, 1964, and was later reprinted to honor Gleason after his death. It remains a significant document in the history of the movement, a document made, to quote Gleason, "with sweat and passion and dedication to truth and honor.".

"I agree with you that this may seem to be a rather theatrical performance today," President Kerr said at the tragedy presented to the University of California Monday in the Greek Theater, and then he added "thanks to the audience, not to those of us up here."

And what he said had the sad ring of a truth greater than he knew because, as it has since the beginning, the dynamic of the whole tragi-comedy, the whole farce, the whole incredible sequence of events has, indeed, come from the students and not from their elders.

"Indeed I live in the dark age," Bertholt Brecht wrote 30 years ago. "... a smooth forehead betokens a hard heart." And it is obvious that the students and the student leaders are not the smooth-forehead IBM products their elders want them to be (and in so wanting have become themselves). It is, really, a continuing contrast in styles.

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part; you can't even tacitly 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. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machines will be prevented from working at all."

Those were the classic words of Mario Savio as he led the sit-in at Sproul Hall last week, later heard on the magnificent KPFA documentary.

And then the next morning -- Berkeley's Black Thursday -- the armed, booted and helmeted police infested the building and dragged the students down the stairs, carefully covering the windows of the stairwell with newspaper so they could not be seen.

"Don't drag 'em down so fast," one cop said to another. "Take 'em down a little slower, they bounce more that way."

It has been a contrast and a confrontation in styles all along, a struggle between a C. Wright Mills-Paul Goodman-Catch-22 generation for whom the bomb dropped before they were born and a generation where cleanliness is next to godliness and you don't make waves, just ride on them.

[More ...]

For background on Gleason and his role in [link|http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/12/23/DDGD5AFE6H1.DTL| Jazz] is this lengthy article. (The dead tree version showed RJG with Beatles in '66, Grateful Dead, etc.)

Fortuitously, I entered Sproul Hall earlier that evening, past the local guards - having leveraged my 'credentials' as presenter of a small program on a local insignificant local radio station. (Somewhere I have a tape of remarks made by Savio to a group around him, made on my Uher portable R-R tape recorder du jour. Believe about a half-hour. As I've mentioned before.)

Alas, I had left the premises before the feet-first dragging out of these students, their heads most-intentionally bashed against each step of the stairwells. The event at the Greek Theatre - also happened as described, including the chop to Savio's neck, as he attempted to address the assembled UC students, faculty and hangers-on. (Just imagine a dissdent voice at one of Shrub's rallies this year.. without credentials or correct Beliefs.)

As to 2005+: it shall be fascinating/likely-depressing to see if any such 'movement' will arise next, opposing the very same reactionary forces of the powerful as have led the sheep today, to abandon rights, liberties and sanity - in service to the same old tired slogans as then. For the same old class hierarchy as then.

Forty Years - about long enough for the daily cacophony of managed-noise to keep the flock mesmerized, help them to forget when, why, if..? any of this ever happened.

(Note within this article, Ferlinghetti's [Poem: Howl] recent description of the complete dearth of any sort of "person of prominence" who might lead in such an aim to restore the Constitution and oust the murderers of language.) I can't think of a single US person of Statesman-like qualities, either... just celebrities with good hair and expensively over-whitened teeth. The others are all dead. Like our 'Honor'.


moi

(as-if- any of them mean anything Useful at all, amidst the serial language murders of each day)

- that it helps not a whit when you runthemalltogether.

In an elevator today, asked a nodding female aquintance, ready for the holidays? "Not when 22 more americans died in Iraq Im not" this was joe matron not college groupie.

Will the yout riseup? checkout eminem's latest vid. Will the willingness of the yout to enlist shoot and be damned and re-enlist cause feedback? yes, because the fighters will see that the politics are fucked and will leave service to serve at home, in positions to question authority.

Will the PC slavishly lockstep enslaved University Locale have any significant impact to the communities? no because they are risking nothing but their mouths, no jail sentences no risk of being drafted so they are irrelevant to this effort.

W.T.F. *are* you talking about?
The students: fucking-A they were draft-bait. More than that, the 'FS' part of FSM *was* about the freedom to discuss, argue, debate -- to Fucking Question the [ever so convenient] 'Tonkin Gulf' event and the rest of bottoned-down McNamara's bafflegab. (Have you followed McN's more recent almost-apologies? his recap of just these precise times/events? The guy who immolated himself outside the Pentagon? yada)

The Professors? your standard knee-jerk anti-intellectual gene surfaces, predictably.
Prior to FSM, the Loyalty Oath hysteria was a patent attack upon tenure; was as much about free speech as the FSM matters. As to what academicians *should do* as they see Constitutions trashed:
W.T.F "should" a Christian\ufffd (or a Jew\ufffd) "do" - while you're passing out specific assignments to labelled personages.

This revolution will take place in the hood, in the blue collar bars and the local shitkickers Unions because they are spilling the blood, not the left, they are safe behind the rhetoric of WDYHASM and wont risk breaking a nail.
doom and gloom,

Yeah, tell me about the Noble Savage in bib overalls One More Time - a real repository of them farmily valuez. They whose "blood"/"wages" are the first casualty of the Neoconman mystique -- which has proven how easily the most banal of Rovian propaganda leads these Noble Savages down the primrose path. Every fucking time.

Yeah, Charlie: WTF could anyone learn in them skoolz, of any Farmily Valuez at all?

No Sale. A Consumer is Not a Citizen, and we have far more of the former than of the latter.. Maybe it's the cholesterol in the ham'n'eggers' clogged plumbing -?- which works quite as effectively as The Tie, in reducing oxygen to brains.

So then - what exactly IS "The Hood" waiting for? Still. Meanwhile. Yet.
Will be fascinating to watch {yawn) all the inaction. Like, to date.


moi

the future as every urkel fashion sense inspired computer nerd throws down their oxy pads and mutters, "enough is enough," then takes to the streets, scsi cards in hand, and it will be dark, dark day indeed my friend.

Delivered passionately, as part of a ~ intro to those who wondered what all the fuss was about. If it seemed to some.. a bit over-dramatized then: I'd wonder today - to one who thought so then - how "the wheels and levers in the '04 Machine" now appear?

{sigh} The way to the cubicle-for-all, the homogenization illustrated by the mushrooming of the hugest monopolies ever - all were forecast pellucidly by C. Chaplin in Modern Times .. but we paid as little attention to that message as to The Great Dictator, an equally prescient forecast of what lay (shortly) ahead, from people with lightning strikes embroidered on their lapels, who strutted a lot.

(Hitler is alleged to have rilly-despised! Chaplin, whereas the Jews were merely a political scapegoat, as always. Ridicule is the ultimate solvent for all pontification and Hitler was no fool. Nor is Rove. He should have despised Chaplin, as should Rove.)

I can see Rodney Dangerfield sorta gettin no respect -- but that the genius of Chaplin went Zooooom, ricocheting off so many dull forebrains seeing only the slapstick -- that said all we need to know about 'us'.)



Anticipating a Vonnegut '05,

moi

that MT was the inspiration - dunno fershure, but canot believe that savvy Mario would never have seen most of Charlie's opera.

(Had I the presence of mind - I coulda asked him, not long after. Now he be daid, and rather too-early.. like most of the other good guys of this execrable century.) Which, by subtraction leaves us with ___ the dregs.



I trust you will not be joining those other wacky Finns, diving into the sea this time of year; still.. have a kewl Gl\ufffddelig Jule, as they say in a nearby noncombative land. Damn, I miss Tivoli...

{sigh} Quite right - recalled that Ronnie used the event to a fare-thee-well, but Pat Brown was indeed the culprit (and he wasn't a nascent neoconman, generally).
I should have remembered the Caryl Chessman thing, for time context..

Much of the subsequent events just runtogether in my mentation, culminating in the National Guard shooting in Berkeley downtown, on Shattuck Ave. Kent State capped it all. Those who imagine that opposition to Vietnam just 'happened' about the time of the widespread marches in '69,'70 weren't paying attention.

Seems to be a lot [link|http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/FSM.html| here] for anyone who cares to delve into how long it used to take to awaken the body politic.
Had there been a web . . .