Lost in MTV Land.

• Author: McKissack, Fred
• Position: MTV's claim on political consciousness - Brief Article

"I see you wear your political T-shirt Wear your sacred college scarf Discussing the world situation but just for a laugh"

--"Rat Race," The Specials.

From the Brown Line "El" train it was hard to tell what was going on at the three-family flat at 1142 N. Orleans on the morning of April 20.

There were sheriff's department deputies with guns drawn surrounding the large, austere, 106-year-old home that sits on the northwest side of the Cabrini-Green housing complex. Firemen stood ready by their trucks, as did camera people and the talking heads. The train slowly rocked past the scene, the passengers in my car gawking and commenting. "Oh, yeah, it's those people," a guy in a leather jacket said out loud, but to nobody in particular. "The judge told `em to get out. I guess that's why the cops are there." The cops were there because five members of the Communist Youth Brigade had barricaded themselves in a third-floor room in an act of civil disobedience.

"We stand by what we have done," reads part of a statement that appeared in a Chicago Tribune story. "We have won a moral and political victory that cannot be taken away or demolished. We have forced the city of Chicago to show it serves a small, greedy, and avaricious class of monied people." The city evicted the residents from the house in order to make way for the gentrification of Cabrini-Green. By the time I rode the train back home that evening, the house had been bulldozed.

Eventually, the lot will be the site of condos no one from that neighborhood will be able to afford.

I'm no big fan of the Communist Youth Brigade, primarily because of their stridency, and because the members I knew were all-theory, no-action wannabes. Then again, most of us "really political" kids in the eighties were the same way. I was an all-theory, no-action wannabe, listening to The Clash and The Specials and college radio, telling myself that I'd never be a sell-out. So, there I am on the train, wearing my well-branded oxford shirt and khaki pants, and holding my well-branded computer bag, which announces to the world that I work for a downtown software company. I stared at the building and wondered why the hell is MTV given so much credit for raising the political consciousness of American youth? Follow me, dear reader, because there is a point coming.

You see, MTV, according to Ad-weekOnline, is reestablishing itself as "the youth-culture zeitgeist." This statement came only weeks after the network brought...