Conversations with Greil Marcus

An Interview with Greil Marcus

9 An Interview with Greil Marcus Mark Kitchell/1984 This interview was conducted in September 1984 as background for Mark Kitchell’s film Berkeley in the Sixties (1990). It was not published. Used by permission of the author. Greil Marcus: The Free Speech Movement was a big shock. It was confusing , it was surprising, it was exciting, it was a day-by-day event than lasted almost three months. It was astonishing. Following that was the so-called “Filthy Speech Movement.” I’ll never forget Mario [Savio, political activist and a key member in the FSM] coming back from Selma to find the campus in an uproar. The Filthy Speech Movement was contrived, made into a big deal by Clark Kerr [president of the University of California], not by Art Goldberg [UC Berkeley student and FSM leader], who was doing his damnedest to make it into a big deal. “We’re from the working class, these are the words we use in the street, why can’t we use them here on the campus?” No one was paying any attention. They had a rally, twenty people came, and then Clark Kerr and Martin Myerson [acting chancellor after FSM] delivered this statement saying, “We can no longer administer this campus, everything’s been destroyed, we resign,” and everybody went, “What? What?” Nothing had happened. So Mario comes back to find everybody running around with their heads cut off, and he gets up and gives this speech on Sproul’s steps [Sproul Hall, campus administration building] trying to diffuse the crisis, because it was a phony crisis and saying that it was totally orchestrated by Kerr to get the regents to give him more power and say, “Come back, we’ll give you power.” He kept referring to it as the “Sexual Intercourse Movement”; it was really hilarious. So that was the first decline. Then in ’66 over the ROTC issue, the recruitment by ROTC on campus. A few people got themselves arrested and it was contrived into a student strike that was a failure. And everybody was going around campus either 10 CONVERSATIONS WITH GREIL MARCUS quoting Marx or Hegel, who says, “Everything happens twice; first is tragedy , then is farce,” or else quoting Bob Dylan, “What price do you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice?” And that strike was the opportunity for the emergence of probably the most pathetic of all campus leaders, Michael Lerner, who was just a cosmic jerk. He got up and made this really stupid speech with a whole pregnancy metaphor that made the forty-five people who were standing in the rain to hear it laugh. But the worst thing had really happened on the anniversary of the Sproul Hall sit-in in 1965. Mario was in England, and so to commemorate the sitin , people wanted to have some sort of civil disobedience, but there was nothing, there was no issue to be disobedient about. So it was decided that people would not sit in at Sproul Hall, they would “mill-in.” So people sort of milled-into the building and milled-out of the building, and then there was this big rally. And what they did for the rally—and I don’t know if you’ve heard about this—they had huge papier maché mock-ups of Mario and Clark Kerr (or maybe it was Edward Strong [former chancellor of UC at Berkeley]) and then someone got inside the papier maché mock-up of Mario and gave his famous speech through the mask while the Kerr figure stood by in fear and terror. It was kind of funny. And then, since there really were some issues, like the war, to talk about, the person (I don’t remember who it was) in Mario’s mask, or in this contraption (it was enormous) gave a speech attacking the Vietnam war from inside the Mario mask. So we’d gone from real people to masks within a year. It was just bizarre. It was totally surrealistic . And everybody was wondering, “Who’s talking? It isn’t Mario. Why doesn’t he take it off and talk?” And the person never did. Things went on to the point where, except in moments of real terror (of which there were plenty), you lost any sense of what was going on. I remember during People’s Park [public park created on university land to prevent development], I was standing on...