Love Letter to Detroit
A couple friends and I watched the wig-out reactions to this commercial roll in over Facebook and Twitter last night with a slight tinge of confusion here in New York City. We thought the whole thing maybe dragged on 30 seconds too long, didn’t need that line from Eminem at the end and certainly not a white guy stepping in front of a black choir to utter it, but more than anything, we were fascinated to see how people back home in Michigan reacted to it and claimed that, they, too, were “Imported from Detroit,” the city that a multi-million-dollar two-minutes now marks as back, baby! Wait, what?
I started writing this post about Detroit last spring during the brouhaha over Chris Hansen’s hour-long Dateline special. The watercooler-talk winner of last night’s Super Bowl ads gives me a chance to revisit it.
Back then, there was a lot of talk around Metro Detroit about the Dateline ep and its allegedly unbalanced portrait of the city. There was a big New York meeting about it with the NBC brass and a town hall at Cobo. On local station WDIV’s Sunday-morning “Flashpoint” show, host Devin Scillian asked his panelists why the broadcast didn’t show a shot of Campus Martius or Eastern Market on a Saturday morning and how such elements could have altered the broadcast and pointed it in a more positive direction. And sure, those things are favorable city features, but they are largely outweighed by the urban blight symbolized by the ubiquitous ruin-porn shot of the decaying train station that all the national media seem to grab when they descend on the city ever since the 2008 bottoming out of the auto industry pulled the city’s decline into the nation’s consciousness.
At the time, razor-sharp blog Dyspathy (writer Jeff Wattrick is now blogging for MLive) had a great missive, the biggest takeaway being this:
We perceive Dateline as the problem. One dimwit on DetroitYES, the in-house art project for the region’s guilty white liberals, says Chris Hansen may have hurt Detroit’s efforts to lure important conventions! Our perceptions are the problem. Dateline doesn’t matter. It’s as insignificant as a grain of sand in the Sahara Desert viewed from a satellite.
What is significant? Start with the city’s $400,000,000 structural budget deficit. Then let’s move onto a metropolitan population more segregated than anything in Jim Crow’s wildest dreams. There are also great Depression-like unemployment rates across the state, and third world literacy rates in the city. We have an outdated state tax system that chips everyone’s paychecks for just enough to not pay for decent roads or affordable public universities. Anyone have a fun story about Avalon’s delicious scones? Maybe someday our outrage can be directed at real problems instead than some hairspray on a second-tier tv news magazine.
Then known to his readers as Woodward’s Friend, Wattrick was right on. Instead of bullshit meetings to beat the dead horse that was the broadcast, what we really should’ve be doing is kicking into high gear efforts to correct things that were, and still are, in fact, the truth.
So now we have this commercial, and we’re wigging out all over again, but for a different reason. This time people are clamoring to call the city their own, although I wonder when they were last downtown on a night when the Wings or Tigers weren’t playing. For me, that was the night I got back into town in December and made my parents take me to dinner at Angelina Italian Bistro, a fabulous place across from Grand Circus Park and the Detroit Opera House and Comerica Park. And you know what? Saturday night and the place was dead. All the people now shouting their allegiance to the Motor City were probably out in Royal Oak.
It wasn’t unlike the night the previous spring that inspired this initial post. It was a gorgeous evening; shortly after 6:30, the sun was still hanging above Woodward Avenue, but the entire area was dead. The Campus Martius fountain was flowing but the café tables that surrounded it were deserted. Traffic in the direction of Wayne State University and the museum district, where I was headed, was virtually nonexistent. Everybody who works downtown had evidently already headed home to Oakland County. Nobody was staying to have dinner or maybe do some shopping, probably because there aren’t a whole lot of places to do either along the main corridor between Hart Plaza and the Fisher Building.
Last year’s Dateline wasn’t entirely off-base, and sure, last night’s commercial was well-produced and inspiring, but there’s still a long way to go before anybody can claim Detroit as “back” or “beautiful.” Everyone who spends any significant amount of time living or working in the city knows it. They know you wouldn’t feel safe walking from the Fox Theater to the Detroit Public Library. They know that even when you’ve got theater tickets at the Fisher, there’s not a single restaurant in the building or even one within walking distance to visit before or after the show. Before we saw “Jersey Boys” last year, my mom and I enjoyed a white-trash dinner of chips and candy bars from the Fisher’s first-floor CVS.
Also worth noting is this story from Ron Dzwonkowski in today’s Freep, citing a recent report that Michigan is the #2 state when it comes to “brain drain”—college graduates leaving the state. So how many people who are so proudly calling themselves “Imported from Detroit” are now living in Chicago or Los Angeles or even here in New York, effectively rendering themselves Detroit EXPORTS?
I don’t mean to harsh anyone’s mellow here, and I’m not claiming to be from the mean streets of the D (I’ll pay the $25 to park in CoPa’s gated parking lot on game days instead of on a side street for free), but I did work down there for close to two years and know what I saw on a day-to-day basis. And in the end, Lauren’s right. If everybody really does take the kind of pride in “their” city that they’re professing and not just because some ad agency told them to, they need to be the people driving the change and development the city so badly needs. It’s a big task, but it can be accomplished one chunk at a time. The best place to start would be on Woodward, right there where Marshall parked his 200 last night.
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Tags: Chrysler, Chrysler 200, Detroit, Eminem, Super Bowl commercial
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