Another Super Bowl has come and gone and with it, the new staple of Super Bowl based commercials: the “Imported from Detroit” Chrysler commercials. Starting in 2011 with a highly successful commercial featuring Eminem and his “Lose Yourself” soundtrack, the Imported ads offer sentimental and positive reflections on Detroit that challenge existing narratives about Detroit of violence, abandonment and ruin.
The Imported campaign’s specific goal was to “save Detroit”. On the surface, that seems to be a worthy goal. Digging deeper, however, reveals many problems with the campaign, most specifically, that nobody has bothered to detail how an industry so intimately connected to Detroit’s problems could possibly now “save” it.
This year’s Imported commercial features Bob Dylan, a bit of relaxed bluesy guitar, and flashes of traditional “American” past times like cowboys wrestling bulls, young boys playing baseball and even a laughing Marylin Monroe. Dylan starts by asserting that there is “nothing more American than America,” and ends with “Let Germany brew your beer. Let Switzerland make your watch. Let Asia assemble your phone. We will build your car.”
While this year’s commercial does not offer the heart thumping working class pride of the previous Eminem commercial or even the sense of “togetherness” of the Clint Eastwood commercial from 2012, it does draw on very familiar themes like the “Made in America” mantra long championed in the US by unions.
Of course, “Made in America” stands by itself as a union critique of the auto industry’s downsizing efforts. As manufacturing jobs left the US in the 80s (coincidentally, hitting Michigan the hardest), unions attempted to mobilize a sense of nationalism to staunch the flow. If you buy American made products, the logic went, it would be less likely that jobs would leave the US.
And yet, you don’t need to scratch too far below Michigan’s surface to see how much more powerful the forces of downsizing (later understood as “globalization”) were than the “Buy American” campaign. Michigan, as noted by the Dylan commercial, rests almost it’s entire reputation and economy on the auto industry. As such, when the auto industry began downsizing in the 80s, Michigan’s unemployment levels skyrocketed. Michael Moore’s documentary “Roger and Me” provides a devastating glimpse of how deleterious the closing of factories by the auto industry was for Flint alone, including 30,000 jobs lost and countless people impoverished.
The economic crisis caused by 80s downsizing is still alive and well in 2014. Detroit (along with other major “auto” hubs like Flint, Saginaw, and Pontiac) is struggling with what we now call “deindustrialization” (a fancier word for ‘the factories shut down and moved to Mexico) and as a result, is currently under what is called “emergency management.” What that means is that the state of Michigan has decided that Detroit is incapable of righting its finances on its own, and has assigned an “emergency manager” to take over the entirety of not only Detroit’s finances, but its government as well.
Under emergency management, union contracts can be voided without oversight. The now infamous “Right to Work” law that limits unions ability to collect dues from members was adopted alongside the emergency manager law, and the 2008-10 bail out saw the union required to make heavy concessions to all of the “Big Three” corporations, including Chrysler. All of these laws and concessions were not only justified, but demanded, in the name of the eternal crisis Michigan has been experiencing since downsizing began.
Returning to the latest Imported commercial, recognizing that the auto industry played a major part in creating the current situation in Detroit (and all of Michigan), the idea that “Americans will make your cars” must be understood in a new way. It’s no longer stands as a heart warming rebranding of a much loved US based industry, or even a careful alliance of corporations with the auto unions. It is instead a deliberate white washing of the historical culpability of the auto industry in the “fall” of Detroit specifically and Michigan as a whole. With this ad, the auto industry erases the truth that they were the ones who left Michigan (and the US) to begin with, and continued the process of deindustrialization through cuts to workers wages and benefits packages. The auto industry is on “our” side again–albeit, “our side” is now controlled by right to work laws laws, emergency managers and crisis induced concessions.
The “American Dream” that Dylan talks about is not one of rebellion and high quality living–it is the loss of democratic rights in the name of corporatism, it is unending resource theft from the working class communities, and most of all, it is lack of accountability. These commercials aren’t just “rebranding” Chrysler, the auto industry or Detroit, they are also rebranding what “culpability” looks like. And in doing so, they are positioning themselves as fixers of the very mess that they created.
Photo by Brett Levin Photography, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
Yes. The auto industry used outsourcing as leverage in negotiating the two-tiered wage system, then left anyway. That also happened to all the nonunion parts factories, too—the ones with low wages and no pensions. It doesn’t matter how much you give up; it’s never enough.