wherein [Mario] Savio walked onstage to speak to the assembled student body and was immediately grabbed at his throat and arms by police and dragged offstage--an administration fiasco that UC president Clark Kerr called "an accident that looked like fascism." In all these events, Savio played no small part in the theater of protest. It was he who first mounted the roof of the police car, taking off his shoes so as not to dent it--a quite sincere act of decorum, though not one that prevented him from comparing the police to Adolph Eichmann (they all "had a job to do"). It was Savio who, before the sit-in, famously urged students to put their "bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and. . .make [the machine] stop"--updating Luddism for the age of the Organization Man. And it was Savio who, at the Greek Theatre, publicly offered his own body to the cause, making his "machine" speech seem much more than mere metaphor.
from The Nation: A Body on the Gears: On Mario Savio
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