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Mario Savio (December 8, 1942 – November 6, 1996) was an American political activist and a key member in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He is most famous for his passionate speeches, especially his "place your bodies upon the gears" address.
His Life
The son of a Sicilian born factory worker, Savio grew up in New York City, went to a public high school (Martin Van Buren High) in Queens, and attended Manhattan College and Queens College before enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley as a philosophy major in 1963. In March of the following year, he was arrested for demonstrating against the San Francisco Hotel Association for excluding blacks from non-menial jobs; in the summer, he traveled to Mississippi as a civil rights worker, helping African Americans register to vote.
Savio rose to prominence as a leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, delivering a fiery speech in Sproul Plaza on December 3, 1964. But Savio was not a fame-seeker and took modest jobs for twenty years before returning to college in the 1980s, this time at San Francisco State University, where he received a summa cum laude bachelor's degree and a master's degree in physics. Savio died at 53. He had a history of heart trouble, and while carrying his son's small amplifier to the car, suffered ventricular fibrillation and lapsed into a coma; his family authorized doctors to disconnect his life support. At the time of his death, he was on the faculty of Sonoma State University teaching mathematics and philosophy.
Savio's first marriage, to Suzanne Goldberg, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Dr. Lynne Hollander, and three sons, Daniel, Nadav, and Stefan.
Honorifics and controversies
In 1997, the steps of Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley, where he led the Free Speech movement, were officially re-named the "Mario Savio Steps" in his honor.
In 2004, it was revealed that Savio was the subject of a massive FBI surveillance program even after he left the Free Speech Movement. The FBI trailed Mario Savio for more than a decade after he left UC Berkeley, and bureau officials plotted to "neutralize" him politically, even though there was no evidence he broke any federal law. <1> According to hundreds of pages of FBI files, the bureau:
* Collected, without court order, personal information about Savio from schools, telephone companies, utility firms and banks and compiled information about his marriage and divorce.
* Monitored his day-to-day activities by using informants planted in political groups, covertly contacting his neighbors, landlords and employers, and having agents pose as professors, journalists and activists to interview him and his wife.
* Obtained his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service in violation of federal rules, mischaracterized him as a threat to the president and arranged for the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies to investigate him when he and his family traveled in Europe.
* Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a "Key Activist" whose political activities should be "disrupted" and "neutralized" under the bureau's extralegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.
Influence
Mario Savio's influence continues to be felt into the twenty-first century. A paraphrase of his famous "gears of the machine" speech appears in the March 2006 season 2 finale of the new Battlestar Galactica TV series. In a podcast about the episode, one of the producers revealed that the original speech had been hanging on his wall for the last five years, and that the paraphrase had been used with the permission of Savio's widow.
The Grindcore band Bodies in the Gears of the Apparatus took their name from the same speech, which can also be heard in the intro of the Fear Factory song "Timelessness" on the album Obsolete, on the Me Mom and Morgentaler song "invasion of the Corporate Cockroaches From Planet Widdley" on the album "Shiva Space Machine", on the From Monument to Masses song "SM-NL", on Good Riddance's "Article IV." It can also be found on Ani DiFranco and Utah Phillips' album Fellow Workers as the track "Unless You Are Free," as well as on Ani's album So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter as the track "'Comes a Time."
The famous speech has been included in many movies over the years, most recently it appeared in Martin Scorsese's documentary on Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, and the 2006 Ryan Fleck film Half Nelson.
Quotes
Mario Savio
* On free speech: "To me, freedom of speech is something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is. ... It is the thing that marks us as just below the angels."
* "We have an autocracy which runs this university. It's managed. We asked the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received, from a well-meaning liberal, was the following: He said, 'Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?' That's the answer! Well I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees! And we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!"
* "There's 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 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! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
* On modern education: "The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex."
* On politics: "I am not a political person. My involvement in the Free Speech Movement is religious and moral. ... I don't know what made me get up and give that first speech. I only know I had to."
* On civil disobedience: "You can't disobey the rules every time you disapprove. However, when you're considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgement of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort."
* "The 'futures' and 'careers' for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers' paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant." ("An End to History", from Humanity, December 1964)
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