Allow me to say something very obvious but often overlooked about this.
Gov. Greg Abbott revived a debate Saturday about a controversial line from a decades-old Pace Picante ad: “Get a rope.”
Abbott tweeted the reference after a follower jokingly asked him what he was going to do about a Whataburger that had run out of Dr Pepper.
One minute later, another Twitter user accused the governor of making an insensitive joke about lynching.
“Lynching jokes? Still? It’s 2019, Greg,” Gary M. Sarli tweeted. The governor responded by telling him to “lighten up, dude.”
“It’s a line ripped off of the Pace Picante Get A Rope Commercial,” Abbott wrote with a link to the old advertisement. “Put a smile on your face. Go to Whataburger & order a double with cheese & jalapeños. Tell them Dr. Pepper sent you.”
Sarli said he remembered the ad too, but it doesn’t justify using the remark.
“It’s not OK,” he replied. “Lynching jokes are making light of the mass murder of Black folks by lynch mobs. It’s not OK to joke about this.”
Let me state for the record that Gary Sarli is correct, lynching jokes were never appropriate, and they are very much still being made far too often and in far too much comfort by prominent people now. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there were many jokes made in the culture from decades past that were wrong then and really, really have no place in the discourse now. You’d think that a guy who was lightning-fast to defenestrate Rick Miller for his racist statements about Asian-Americans might have just a tad bit more self-awareness about lynching-related jokes.
But look, maybe someone should gently inform Greg Abbott that the commercial in question was made in 1992. There are many, many people alive and living in Texas right now that have never seen that ad, or that have no memory of it. People react to “Pace Picante Sauce commercial” references in part because of the horrible legacy that underlies the joke in question, but also because they have no idea what the reference is about. It comes completely out of the blue to them, in the way that a joke based on Evening Shade or Blossom or Wings might land. Tell Abbott to have his staffers quiz their children and grandchildren about what’s funny today, and go from there. I mean, Abbott making a joke about the Peloton wife may be painful, but it’s less likely to result in this kind of controversy. I’m just saying.