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WATCH: ‘This Is My First Rodeo’ | Ben Meets America Ben Kawaller

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In the latest stop on his cross-country quest to understand America, Ben Kawaller watches men hurl cows to the ground.

Last month I attended The American Rodeo in Arlington, Texas, a city of around 400,000 souls situated between Dallas and Fort Worth. This was my first rodeo, and it did not take me long after entering its host venue, the gargantuan Globe Life Field, to realize that I did not know what a rodeo was. If you’d asked me six weeks ago to define the term, I would have said something like, “It’s when you watch someone career around an enclosed pen on an animal.” 

Which is actually not too far off. But what I hadn’t realized is that a rodeo is actually a sporting event. 

You see, some people are especially good at bending these animals to their will, and if you are one of those people, you can win competitions for things like making the animals run very fast, or tying the animals up very quickly, or not dying while trying to sit on one of the animals.

Of course, I wasn’t really there for the games; I was there to talk to the crowd about what makes our society so divided. If you’re tuning in for the first time to my new series—“Ben Meets America”—I was born and raised in progressive Brooklyn, I now live in West Hollywood, and I will admit to being soft in some fundamental way. Suffice it to say I get a more transcendent high from watching a torch song than I do from watching a man hurl a small cow to the ground.

But, in fact, theater and rodeo have their similarities. If you’ve been to a play in recent years, you will have suffered the degradation of a “land acknowledgement.” This is when the audience is told before the show—either in an announcement or in the program notes—that they’ve gathered on land stolen from whatever Native American tribe existed there years ago. My sense is that some of this is rooted in the idea that America itself is fundamentally illegitimate. Whatever’s behind it, the inclusion of a land acknowledgement has become de rigueur.

I did not think conservatives did land acknowledgements, so I was surprised when the Native American actor Mo Brings Plenty appeared before the start of one of the competitions and performed a minute or two of indigenous wailing. I believe the intent of this was to, well, acknowledge the fact that Native American bloodshed was central to the expansion of the American West. What I did not expect was the incongruence of what came after. Watch the video and you’ll see what I mean. I’m still puzzling over its significance.

In the end, however, I decided I prefer the conservative version of a land acknowledgement. Unlike the inane liberal sacrament, it appears to be capable of expressing two truths at once: that oceans of indigenous blood were spilled in the creation of this country, and that we live in one of the greatest nations on earth.

Even if one of our favorite spectator sports is man versus cow.

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It Pays to Be a Friend of Donald Trump Joe Nocera

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Two dodgy Democrats had a great day on Monday—thanks to our new Republican president, Donald J. Trump.

The first, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, was granted a full pardon. Back in 2009, after he’d been charged with corruption, Blagojevich got himself booked on Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice. (You can see his appearance in these YouTube clips. He was fired, of course.) I don’t know if Blagojevich had a premonition that Trump might someday be in a position to help him, but it sure has turned out that way. Transforming himself from a high-profile Democratic governor to a big-time Trump supporter was the single best move he could have made.


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Stop Making Cents? Charles Lane

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On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he has ordered his administration to cease production of the penny. The argument for the move seems straightforward enough. It costs more than a penny to make a penny (3.7 cents, according to the U.S. Mint). Given inflation and the move to digital payments, ditching the coin is just common cents, right?

Not necessarily. Life’s about more than just making the numbers add up, and amid all the government waste, doesn’t the humble penny deserve a carve out for sentimental reasons?

Today, we debate the penny’s fate. Good riddance or gone too soon? Deputy Editor Charles Lane supports Trump’s move. Consulting Editor Jonathan Rosen opposes it. Have at it, gentleman.

Charles Lane: President Trump’s decision to end production of the penny has my total support. This mite of a coin betrayed me, quite directly and personally, over the course of 13 years.

“Save your pennies, Chuck,” a supervisor at work told me in 2002, responding to some angst I expressed about future college tuition costs. This was her way of not getting the hint that I needed a raise.

Attitudinally positive as always, I took her advice. I told my 5-year-old son that we would henceforth be keeping every one-cent coin we received as change, found on the street, or won playing dreidel until the moment he left for college.

What a father-son project! So rich in lessons about thrift, consistency, and long-term thinking! And so we collected and collected, filling first one large glass jug and then another, until July 2015, when it was time for the big reveal: We had accumulated 10,142 pennies, about 2.19 per day.

They were worth $101.42, not even enough to cover a month’s fraternity dues.

Wrapping the little suckers in paper rolls to enable deposit at a bank took me several days. Valued at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the time wasted offset any wealth embodied in our hoard—with change left over.

So I did not need the DOGE to tell me the government lost over $179 million in fiscal year 2023 minting more than 4.5 billion one-cent pieces at a cost of three-plus cents each. I already knew that a penny is much more trouble than it’s worth.


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Nellie Bowles: The Triumph of the Plastic Straw Nellie Bowles

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The biggest environmentalist craze of my generation started in 2011 with Vermont 9-year-old Milo Cress cooking up an arbitrary number for how many plastic straws Americans used daily. This 9-year-old figured it was so many. He says he called up straw manufacturers and calculated 500 million a day. Boom, big number, good number. The mainstream media was off to the races. That 500 million a day number was cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Suddenly the most important thing we could do for the environment—for our children!—was ban plastic straws.

States and cities passed laws against them. California banned them from restaurants outright in 2018. New York, in 2021, changed the law so the only straws on display were paper (you were allowed to ask for plastic). Official fact sheets from Ron DeSantis’s state of Florida instruct Floridians to “Skip the Straw,” citing the 500 million figure. Did anyone question the basis of this?


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