The importance of ‘Keeping It Juicy’

Johnsonville, one of the most popular sausage brands in America, announced a new ad campaign April 8 they have titled “Keep It Juicy.”

The campaign, which features actor Vince Vaughn, will of course emphasize that Johnsonville sausages are known for being succulent and juicy. Already considered a staple at holiday and gameday hangouts, tailgate parties, barbecues and backyard neighborhood gatherings, the sausage — however tasty — is not the subject of the “Keep It Juicy” national campaign.

According to Jamie Schmelzer, senior director of marketing for Johnsonville, “We realized America needed more than a reminder to eat sausage, so ‘Keep It Juicy’ encourages people to take a break from all the negativity, gather some good people, make some great food, then keep it fun and keep it together, if only for a few hours. Of course, we hope our sausage is on the menu.”

“Why not a sausage company to encourage folks to turn down the temperature a bit, hang out together and have a little more fun?”

A creative advertising agency from Milwaukee, Hold Fast, designed this interesting media blitz. Brian Ganther, Hold Fast executive creative director, admitted: “A sausage company making a cultural statement about America is sort of ridiculous. But the truth is, anger is addictive and 2024 is only going to get more heated. So why not a sausage company to encourage folks to turn down the temperature a bit, hang out together and have a little more fun?”

The company offers a “cooking tip” for those of us starving for a break: In the same way a grill master should keep it “low and slow” when cooking Johnsonville products, Americans ought to “turn down the temperature in life to Keep It Juicy.”

We must consider comments we may have heard — or possibly expressed — after the recent presidential debate:

• “President Trump’s constant lies and arrogant attitude just burned me up! His behavior turns my stomach!”
• “President Biden is so old and feeble he’s way past his prime! He should just be thrown out!”
• “I can never again socialize with her, or with him, because our political differences are too divisive!”
• “We’re friends just as long as we don’t talk about presidential candidates!”

The mudslinging didn’t begin on the CNN debate stage. The two presumptive candidates appeared at competing rallies just 70 miles apart in Georgia eight months before election day. The diatribe, especially from Trump, demonstrated just how divisive our political arena has become.

The Washington Post reported:

Trump spoke for nearly two hours and leveled his attacks in particularly personal and inflammatory ways. He mocked Biden for having a stutter, called the press “criminals” and blamed the president for the death of a young woman who was allegedly killed by a Venezuelan migrant who entered the country illegally.

Biden was not genteel either. No doubt, his supporters remembered his “fiery” State of the Union speech just two days prior, when he condemned the former president as a threat to our freedom, democracy and individual rights.

James Piazza, a political science professor at Penn State, began studying political hate speech in 2022 and has concluded that when politicians use inflammatory language to describe their opponents, “this makes their societies more likely to experience political violence and terrorism.” The professor not only researched such tendencies in America. He also examined the increase of political violence in countries such as India, Poland, Russia, Colombia, Israel, Egypt, Ukraine, the Philippines, Italy, Greece, Sri Lanka and Iraq.

“Since the beginning of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, domestic terrorism has more than doubled in the United States.”

Piazza argues: “These remarks are not just empty rhetoric or political theater. My research shows that when politicians use hate speech, domestic terrorism increases — in the U.S. and in other countries. Indeed, since the beginning of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, domestic terrorism has more than doubled in the United States.”

Amid all the angst felt by Democrats since Biden’s poor debate performance — as well as the ridicule from Republicans not only for his halting speech and memory lapses but his being helped down the stairs by his wife — a couple of memes have surfaced. One that appeared today on my Facebook crawl declares: “I’ll take my elder statesman with a half century of experience over your traitor.”

This reaction is admittedly a subjective comparison of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, regardless of whether or not one thinks it is based on fact.

But the evidence of the last several years does indeed point to the stark contrast in the character of these two men. Objective analysis, like that of Penn State’s Piazza — who is not a Democratic operative but an unaffiliated political scientist — corroborates the accusation that Trump’s buckshot bravado and toilet tongue terror tactics have given permission to a lot of uninhibited people to say and do hateful things also. Our country, therefore, has suffered many tragic consequences of Trump’s unbridled innuendos, accusations and personal attacks.

Testimonies from many of the arrested January 6 rioters at the U.S. Capitol refer to Trump as the one who inspired their action. His identification with the angry crowd by saying, “We’re going to go down to the Capitol” and his incentivizing them to “fight like hell” clearly sent them off on a destructive mission.

Ryan J. Reilly, writing for NBC News, reacted to Trump’s debate answer concerning the January 6 insurrectionists and his repeated prior references to pardoning them when he becomes president again.

This, notes Reilly, was a mob who “brandished firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive ‘Trump’ billboard, ‘Trump’ flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device during an attack that injured about 140 police officers.”

So, are they really “hostages,” “warriors” and “victims”?

While he was praised for being extremely assertive and confident, one might argue Trump’s aggressive, rapid-fire delivery of scores of lies and particularly his lowbrow jab at Biden’s son Hunter exasperated the president and caused him to lose his way. That explanation may be true, although the cynic might ask if a younger person would have been immobilized in the same way.

“There is one consequence of Trump’s language that has been demonstrated so many times it is no longer viewed as biased.”

Yet, there is one consequence of Trump’s language that has been demonstrated so many times it is no longer viewed as biased — namely, his inflammatory rhetoric gives hundreds of his followers, from all over the nation, the boldness to act upon their worst impulses and to do things they would never have dreamed of doing in their previous lives.

A recent incident in Dallas illustrates the horrific level to which some Americans have stooped during this season of politically motivated hate speech and violence. A white woman named Wolf has been arrested and charged with attempted capital murder and injury to a child for her attack on a Muslim family at an apartment pool on May 19.

The American-Muslim mother, called “Mrs. H.,” told the Council on American-Islamic Relations she and her 6-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter came to the pool. The defendant approached the mother, who was wearing a modest bathing suit and hijab, and began rudely to interrogate her: “Where are you from? Why are you here? Are those your children?”

As the little boy and girl played in the shallow end of the pool, Wolf jumped into the water, grabbed the two children and dragged them into the deep end of the pool. The boy managed to escape her grasp, but the 3-year-old could not, and the woman repeatedly began to shove her head under the water.

Mrs. H. rushed into the pool, screaming: “Help me! She’s killing my baby! She’s killing my baby!”

When the mother got close to her terrified daughter, Wolf snatched her hijab and began slapping her with it. One person on the side of the pool called 911 while another jumped in and rescued the traumatized child who was crying and coughing up water. Pool guests held Wolf until police arrived and arrested her.

“Tell her I will kill her, and I will kill her whole family.”

As the woman was being taken away, she yelled to someone attending to the distraught mother and her children, “Tell her I will kill her, and I will kill her whole family.” In the aftermath of this terrible experience, Mrs. H. says her daughter runs and hides every time her mother opens the apartment door, because she is terrified the woman will come again and put her head under the water.

This unbelievable act of hatred happened in America, just a couple of weeks ago, only two hours from where I live. Mrs. H. is a Palestinian-American, not at all certain now that our country is a safe place for her family to be.

Miroslav Volf, Christian professor at Yale Divinity School, who was born in war-torn Yugoslavia — which no longer exists — comments on his adopted country as an American citizen:

Sometimes when I observe contemporary U.S. culture, with its hard fronts and nasty culture wars, I have a strange sense that I’ve seen something like it before — in the Communist and semi-totalitarian state in which I grew up. The issues and positions are very different, but the spirit is strangely familiar. In all public discussion, there was a party line that people had to toe; if you diverged, you were deemed disloyal and suspected of betraying the cause. I sense a similar spirit today among both progressives and conservatives in the United States.

Our political climate — and especially the super-heated atmosphere of hatred, suspicion, incivility and even violent action — are altering the country we once were. Given these awful realities, our shared motto needs to be, “Make America Kind Again!”

If ever there was a time to relax, settle down, listen more, talk less and serve platters of barbecue and pitchers of lemonade to people who might not actually agree on Biden or Trump, it is now.

We must reject the un-American charred relationships that are so common today, and Keep It Juicy!

 

Rob Sellers is professor of theology and missions emeritus at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon Seminary in Abilene, Texas. He is a past chair of the board of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. He and his wife, Janie, served a quarter century as missionary teachers in Indonesia. They have two children and five grandchildren.