In Defense

Last night I watched my first Super Bowl ever. Of course, I use the term "watched" quite loosely here. It's more like I was present at my first Super Bowl viewing ever. "Watched the Super Bowl" may have only have described my attention for about four minutes. The rest of my attention was devoted to eating a hot dog, lighting birthday candles on my brother's birthday cake, playing games on my Kindle (because I felt like games made me look more potentially-engaged in game-watching than reading), watching a really entertaining sideshow involving Jin stealing rawhide donuts from Scout and Scout trying to get them back, and failing miserably at my sister's new Wii dance game during halftime.

I also paid attention long enough to watch a couple commercials, like the Darth Vader commercial, or the Kid in a Candy Store commercial. But not all of them. During one commercial break, I was buried in my Kindle and only half paying attention to my siblings' commentary when I heard swelling music and someone asking, "Is that Eminem?" I glanced up to see Eminem walking into a large empty theater with a gospel choir on the stage, and someone over on the couch started laughing, and then Eminiem said "This is Motor City. And this is what we do." That grabbed my attention. I had missed almost the entire commercial and I got chills just thinking about what the rest of the commercial must have been like, and when my brother declared it the lamest commercial ever and was met with general agreement from the room, I kept quiet but I wanted very, very badly to say something in defense of the commercial. I felt like they were treading dangerously on sacred ground. It was not about Eminem or the gospel choir or the car. It was about Detroit. But I couldn't say anything because I hadn't been paying attention.

I was so offended by their mockery that I left shortly thereafter.

No, actually I wasn't offended at all. I get why someone with no connections to Detroit might have thought that the gospel choir felt over the top, and if you were expecting a humorous payoff, yeah, you would have been disappointed. I left because the gathering had turned from a socializing-with-family gathering to a game-watching gathering and I wasn't really watching and figured I could better use my time at home.

But this morning when my Michigan friends posted links to the ad all over their blogs and facebook walls, I was able to watch from beginning to end and can now legitimately explain to my family why the commercial was, in fact, not lame, but awesome, and I want to give them the chance to watch the ad again with Detroit eyes instead of luxury-sedan-commercial-featuring-Eminem eyes.




I know it's just a commercial, but it gives me goosebumps.

But that in itself made me think a little while I was out on my morning run. After all, I lived in Ann Arbor. So why, when my siblings were mocking a commercial that I hadn't even seen in its entirety, did I feel such a desire to interrupt them and help them understand about Detroit?

Not long before I left Michigan I had a conversation with a woman from the stake who was at a Hill Street Ward activity. I don't remember who she was or why she was there, but she asked me what I was doing in Michigan, and I told her, and that I was about to leave Michigan to teach at BYU, and how I had grown to really love the state and would miss it. "Even Detroit," I said, and she seemed surprised. "I've lived here for x years now," she told me, "and I feel no affinity for Detroit." She said it with genuine curiosity, like she really wanted to know how I'd come to feel any sort of attachment to Detroit. But thirty seconds of small talk didn't give me much chance to explain, or even really reflect on it myself.

I think there are probably some people who see Detroit as the blight on an otherwise wonderful state, and some people who see Detroit as part of the package - if you're going to love Michigan, you've got to take Detroit along with it. And when I lived in Michigan, I did not immediately start out in the second camp. Detroit was the place where you went, hit the baseball game or the opera, and left as quickly as possible. But after going there often enough, not just for a baseball game or an opera, but for the DIA and the science museum and a Thanksgiving Turkey Trot and the auto show and several restaurants and Jonathan's Tour of Detroit (twice with friends and once with my parents) and a Detroit cleanup service project, I started to see Detroit as a place with a lot of human history, and as an ongoing story, and that I was now a very small, peripheral part of that story myself.

And that made me think about stories, and how it's not just Detroit the place, but Detroit the story that draws people in. When I entered the Detroit story there was already a long, rich backstory, with a rise and a fall, and now the story is at that point where you can start to see some rising from the ashes. But the stories that will come from the ashes are stories that couldn't have happened without that fall. The story of Detroit is the story of being refined through mistakes and hardship, and that's a very powerful, resonant story. It's the story Detroit is trying to live out, and the story that Chrysler is trying to create for itself (hence the ad), and the story of each of our individual lives, and it's even a gospel story that's repeated over and over again in scripture and history and our very doctrine. So I think when I watched that ad all the way through for the first time and got chills from a car commercial, it wasn't just because I saw the Spirit of Detroit* and thought, "Hey, I've been there!" It was because even though Chrysler was trying to sell its own story, they did so by using Detroit's story, and that story itself speaks on a deeper level to all of our stories.

I know that's a lot of analysis for what really is just a car commercial. But I didn't get to explain about Detroit last night. Now I can.



* That statue is called the Spirit of Detroit. It just occurred to me that if someone didn't know that, it would look like a really cheesy blog line. "I saw the Spirit of Detroit in the ad..."