Protesting Gets Real
by Clay Risen

So it's come to this.

For the past four weekends hundreds of protesters have gathered at the "Real World" house in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, surrounding the building and harassing the stars. They hand out flyers promising to "Free the 'Real World' Seven" and screeds decrying corporate media. The protests, well-publicized and regularly scheduled, make for great entertainment, and just as many people show up to watch as to participate.

The "Real World" is one of the granddaddies of "reality-based" programs. Airing on MTV, it follows the lives of seven young people living and working together (with varying levels of success), and each new season is filmed in a new location. But while anti-"Real World" sentiment has sprung up in other cities — New Orleans and Seattle, most notably — the community reaction in Chicago has been particularly vociferous. This is because the show's producers, aiming for a "hip" location, chose Wicker Park, a neighborhood predominated by artists and frequented by hipsters, a neighborhood full of low-fi coffee shops and cheap studios, unwilling to open its arms to a squad of DKNY-clad celebrities. The "Real World" house itself is the former premises of a coffee shop/performance space, making the filming all the more offensive in the eyes of the protesters.

But Wicker Park is also a neighborhood in the midst of gentrification, and with a new Starbucks nearby and chic restaurants popping up every other week, you might wonder just what the protesters are defending in the first place. After all, gentrification is historically an unstoppable force in Chicago — Lincoln Park was ground zero for the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests; now it's home to one of the world's highest densities of Gaps.

Nevertheless, something is happening here — young people don't spend their Friday nights standing outside an apartment for nothing. They're angry, and if their cause doesn't necessarily advance world peace it does make a coherent statement against the corporatization of American life. Neighborhoods should not be made into film studios, and the "Real World" in particular tends to take a bullying, slash-and-burn approach to its location shoots, demanding access to local businesses and leaving residences in tatters.

Yet, like their spiritual counterparts in Genoa, Prague and elsewhere, the protesters are often dismissed as people with nothing better to do, aimless ruffians making trouble just for the fun of it. And watching black-clad anarchists smashing windows in Seattle or DIY punks throwing paint on the door of the "Real World" house, it's easy to jump to such a conclusion. Even some erstwhile, '60s-era protest leaders have denounced the anti-globalization movement as aimless and dangerous.

That may be. But it's also a mark of the times, and if these kids consistently, violently lash out, it's dangerous to ignore the subtext of their rage.

The difference between now and the 1960s is that back then, young people really could make a difference. Burning your draft card was more than just a refusal to support the war; it took one more soldier out of the military's roster. The very idea of mass protest was something so shocking to the post-war Establishment that the Free Speech Movement or SNCC really were taken seriously when they agitated for social change.

Today, though, how many people outside the New New Left take seriously Global Exchange's calls for a change in the international trading system? There's nothing fundamentally different between their tactics and those of SNCC, yet where the latter made great strides the former are mocked and ignored. The real answer, then, lies in the structure they're opposing — it's not reacting because it's not threatened, and it's not threatened because it doesn't need them. Protesters are a mere inconvenience for the architects of global trade; they simply erect defensive zones around summit meetings.

The mobility of capital and the power of the media to manipulate the public make many minority opinions, not to mention many individual attitudes, superfluous. If you don't like the system, fine — the system doesn't need you. It will find other markets, or it will produce opinion polls proving you wrong. In the past, Leftists feared systematic oppression; these days they fear systematic disregard.

And that, more than anything else, is what the protesters here in Chicago and abroad in Genoa are fighting against. They're fighting to be heard, to be recognized by a socio-economic system that no longer cares whether they agree or disagree with it. They look at the "Real World" house and see it less as an invasion of their territory than as a symbol of universal neglect; they know they won't make a difference, that the show will go on and they won't even make it into the final cut, and that's what pisses them off. That they can be ignored. Anarchists smash windows not because it's fun but because they feel that's the only way the "system" is going to listen to them; they rage against the machine in one final, violent scream. Today's protesters find themselves rendered innocuous, and because of that, they yell even louder.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.