The View from Boomer Valhalla

GONZO

Flying to Dallas for the Republican Midterm Convention

By Denzel Rust · September 15, 2026 · 13 min read

I’m in an Uber to DFW. It’s September 11th, 2026, a quarter century since two hijacked planes hit and destroyed the World Trade Center, an event the other DFW, David Foster Wallace, wrote about in his 2001 essay “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s.”

Wallace recounted the atmosphere of patriotism that pervaded Bloomington, Illinois in the weeks that followed “the Horror.” He notes the way in which, almost overnight, the entire town became draped in audacious American flags. Unsure where to buy one, the flags become a source of personal anxiety as he imagines the wordless ire his flag-less home might draw.

“The point being that on Wednesday here there’s a weird accretive pressure to have a flag out. If the purpose of a flag is to make a statement, it seems like at a certain point of density of flags you’re making more of a statement if you don’t have one out. It’s not totally clear what statement this would be.”

He recounts having a panic attack and rushing into a local Qik-n-EZ, only to receive solace and “a strange kind of unspoken understanding” from the store’s Pakistani proprietor. His main point of illustration being the overwhelming shows of nationalist solidarity that were everywhere in 2001. Maybe you can remember them. I’m a zoomer, so I can’t.

I look out the window expecting to see these displays of remembrance—billboards, posters, murals—but evidence of the tragedy is nowhere to be found. I pass a new restaurant called Foodistan, then the massive Islamic Center of Irving, which is set to receive a $4.8 million addition that will expand the complex to well over 100,000 square feet. I pass by cancerously replicating suburbs and myopically zoned plazas. By faceless office parks and corporate HQs perched on immaculate green hills straight out of a Windows XP wallpaper. But I don’t see a single flag.

THE TRUMPAPALOOZA

I’ve spent the last two days at the Republican National Midterm Convention, referred to colloquially as the “Trumpapalooza.” A Potemkin convention, the first ever held by either major party between Presidential elections. There were no candidates to nominate or platforms to adopt. There were delegates, arranged neatly by state, but they placed no votes. Despite taking place a day before the anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and two before 9/11, the unconvention felt more like a Jimmy Buffett concert than a convocation or memorial. It had the hedonistic energy of warehouse rave or luxury-cruise afterparty. A boomer Valhalla taking place at the zenith of MAGA’s institutional power, and in the midst of its cultural decline.

As the proud owner of an aisle seat I was tasked with the responsibility of standing up and making room when people entered and exited my row. The convention being around six hours long meant I was party to an incalculable amount of these microinteractions. What struck me was that when the various attendees (whose median age hovered around 65) approached me, they never defaulted to the embarrassed whispers you encounter in movie theaters or academic lectures, but rather joked affably, as though I had known them for years.

“I just missed you fellas and I wanted to say hi!” an old woman quipped as she squeezed past myself and a chubby young photographer.

“We missed you too,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be back before you know it!” she replied, with a tip of her hot-pink TRUMP-branded cowboy hat.

In front of me, a man with a combover rivaling the long arc of the moral universe carefully separated the crusts from his personal pan pizza. To my left, an aging boomer DJ smoothly switched from “Pinball Wizard” to a remix of “Billie Jean.”

An alien in the audience would probably conclude that the single biggest issue facing the nation is transgender men in women’s sports.

“[Sherrod Brown] fought to allow men in women’s sports and demanded that we call mothers pregnant persons!” shouted John Husted, to raucous boos.

“Jon Ossoff wants to let boys play girls in sports!” enunciated Tim Scott, like a fire-and-brimstone preacher performing an exorcism at an all-black church.

At one point, Riley Gaines presented a three-minute video dedicated entirely to the issue. It ended with the line, “Protect the competition, protect girls’ sports. That’s not politics, that’s common sense,” the kind of this, not that phrasing which reeked of Claudeslop, but nonetheless received thunderous applause.

There were no B-sides or deep cuts, only the hits. Top 40 bangers from long-2016 about cancel culture, political correctness, and the enduring spectre of arch-dem Nancy Pelosi. When comedian Adam Carolla stepped up to the plate, he opened with a sarcastic land acknowledgment, unaware that Representative Brandon Gill had made the exact same joke a few hours prior. The American Right simply cannot stop adopting the frame of its enemies.

“We’ve gone from auto-pen to overdrive, from a President who can’t stay awake to a President who never sleeps!" said Sec. Scott Bessent. Another suspiciously LLM-y line that similarly whipped a stadium of 70-year-olds into fits of stone throwing laughter, given that they were all themselves approaching senility, if not already very obviously there.

The woman in the hot-pink cowboy hat returned with a tray of chicken fingers fossilized in grease.

“Well now? Did ya miss me?”

Despite the looming silver anniversary of the most significant terror attack in our history, both the Horror and the Iran War went largely unmentioned by the procession of speakers. A glaring omission, and a lazy one–creating a weak flank for the Dems to exploit, two puny months before the midterms.

A few rows ahead, in the Wisconsin section, a woman with a large cheese-wedge hat aggressively confronted a man draped in the Persian flag. He put his hands up, frantically trying to defend himself, then pulled out his phone to, I assume, show her the difference between the current regime’s flag and the one it had violently overthrown. She apologized and waddled back to Wisconsin.

“Is that the Mexican flag?” asked a woman behind me, noticing the commotion.

Trump time approached. The lights dimmed, the DJ turned up the music, the hearing aids turned it down, and the boomers who had been sitting for three or four hours began to dance. At this point, the noticeable bifurcation in boomer women’s bodies became pronounced. Half were so large they were fused to their seats, the others so fit they could pop-n-lock like sorority girls. Women with marbled spray tans and lizard skin, standing with military posture in bespoke cocktail dresses, whose faces, in net cost of operations, well eclipsed my annual salary.

Then, following a rendition of “God Bless the U.S.A.” by 83-year-old Lee Greenwood, Trump took the stage and the boomers lost their minds. Varicose fists pumping, silicone tits bouncing, and thousands of glistening lanyards swaying from lifted necks. It was as though the man had just built the Triple Towers and brought back Charlie Kirk from the dead. It was as though their rising Zestimates were directly proportional to white replacement birth rates. They had won their wars, flipped their fixeruppers, and cashed out just in time. Margaritaville blasting, replacement-hips gyrating, and a tab that would have to be paid by someone else. They watched the Sun come up over a blissfully short horizon.

“So the dumocrats, as I call them—They said, ‘Sir, don’t use that, this is a very important speech,’” Trump joked, downplaying the seriousness of the event, “But they’re dumocrats because their policy is so bad. It’s so bad. And I usually don’t like talking about how bad. Like for instance, men playing in women’s sports.”

Then a moment of hilarious self-awareness.

“I’m petrified that they’ll change and they’ll say, ‘You know what? Men should not be playing in women’s sports.’ And that will really hurt us. That’s one of our great sound bites of all time.”

Boomer heads flew back in ecstasy. A guy with a tiny Israeli flag passed me going up the steps. The sedentary man in front of me, who had carefully decrusted his personal pan pizza, picked the box up once again and began eating them for dessert.

Trump killed. He joked about renaming the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean the “American Ocean,” but prefaced that we’d have to pick one. He attacked James Talarico for wanting to “Beat Meat.” He successfully endorsed AG Ken Paxton while calling him “Not the best looking guy I’ve ever seen.” As for the Iran War, he assured us we were winning.

The convention boomer, at the peak of their institutional and financial power, might oppose immigration, globalized trade, or inflation, but find themselves pacified by a consistently overperforming portfolio. They might not like the fact that Indians and Pakistanis have colonized the suburbs of Plano, but still benefit from Line Go Up™ by Edward Jones. And so they fixate on the culture war, on women’s sports, on the right to joke, on the shameless affectation that’s so attractive in Trump himself, while waiting to die. This is the core of twilight conservatism, a performative politics of cultural restoration, with blinders toward real decline, by a complacently boozed-up economic incumbency.

There was also the glitch. A bizarre moment when, during Trump’s speech, the video behind him started to play rapidly sped up footage of the entire convention. It was like MAGA itself was having some kind of stroke, and the entire movement’s life was flashing before its eyes.

Trump ended his speech by promising a $5k dividend if the Republicans kept the house. One final round for last-call conservatism.

I made my exit, slipping past the rows of fondly gazing faces, past the slowly closing concession stands, and into the starless dark humidity of a Dallas, Texas night. Outside were the remains of the merch tents, which sold Charlie Kirk shirts, bedazzled snapbacks, red, white, and blue shawls, elephant keychains, and plush toy ducks with Trump’s signature golden-haired swoop. I called a car to another right-wing afterparty, this one more my demo.

THE AFTERPARTY

Almost all “right-wing” parties are the same. You’ll have a few elder statesmen or respected intellectuals holding court outside, someone like Curtis Yarvin or Joe Allen fielding questions from overdressed, baby-faced anons, who are always both more handsome and more blindingly autistic than expected. The drinks will be free or wildly overpriced. You’ll say, “I think we follow each other already,” only to both pull out your phones and realize one of you doesn’t follow the other back. “It’s all good, I get it, there’s a million people on there.”

You’ll have a few Blaze readers who leave early and a few MAMA readers doing key bumps in a Tulum-themed handicapped bathroom. A gender ratio reflective of most WWI infantry units, wherein the few clinically insane women who attend are swarmed for hours and molested with prerehearsed rants and badly cribbed opinions.

But beneath it all, there is a seriousness. All night, young men arrange themselves into semicircles in order to scheme, plan, and strategize, debating where things went wrong and how they might be fixed. In contrast to their boomer parents, surfing the last smooth stretch of the right’s red wave, they possess an inbred doomerism, a decline consciousness born of longer and more tenuous horizons. Aware of the quickly closing epoch, and hastily making plans to survive what comes next.

“Where were you on 9/11?” I asked a young guy, sweltering inside a cheap polyester suit on the venue’s humid balcony.

“I was a baby. First time I remember asking my parents about it was after I saw that South Park episode where Bush headshots a truther in the Oval Office.”

For Gen Z, 9/11 was less a seismic and specific event than a constantly lurking punchline. The thing you weren’t supposed to joke about that everyone joked about anyway. We have no answer to the “where were you?” question, only a subconscious glut of memetically flexible phrases. BLANK was an inside job. Bush did BLANK. Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams. A second BLANK has hit the BLANK. Never forget. None of it real, just mad-libbed gaps.

There are reasons for this. The first being the collective guilt and shame over the subsequent Iraq War, and the second being the general prosperity and cultural homogeneity of late ’00s and early ’10s America. But now NYC has not only a Muslim mayor, but one who is sympathetic to the phrase “globalize the intifada.” And now, even on the tragedy’s 25th anniversary, you’re unlikely to feel its presence in the world unless you open your phone and are subject to a certain algorithm.

And so, while the boomers celebrated their victories against wokeness, and their right to take nothing seriously, their sons, now leaving the afterparty, seemed to be coming up against the ceilings of transgression, and looking for something more.

I left with my crew. Hungry and somewhat dejected, we stopped at the best-reviewed burrito place within 10 miles of Las Colinas. It was a kitchen in the back of a gas station. I ordered my burrito from a Mexican at one counter, then paid an Indian guy for my water at another. While waiting, I wandered toward the back and noticed a lone woman playing on a series of slot machines.

THE HANGOVER

The morning of my flight home, I had forgotten it was 9/11 entirely. I took an aspirin for the hangover, did a saline spray for the nostril pain, and chugged a big gulp of hotel tap before falling back into bed and pulling out my phone. Only when I began to scroll was I reminded of the Horror.

Hundreds of videos of the impact. Videos from every angle, where if you turn up the volume you can hear people begin to shriek after the second plane. Tiny people on zoomed in camcorders like flattened ants falling almost peacefully to their death. Their shoes. The terrible hellish heat they must have experienced to be desperate enough to jump at all. Videos of people on the ground, first fast-walking from the blast site, and then, as the ground level mushroom cloud begins to rapidly approach them, sprinting at breakneck speeds away from its ravenous blast radius. Watching this for hours, horizontal, as the day breaks through cheap venetian blinds.

In Wallace’s essay, his elderly neighbors also crowd around a then impressive ‘42″ flat-panel Philips TV’ to watch repeats of the Horror. Wallace begins to suspect the networks aren’t endlessly replaying the footage for viewers who haven’t seen it, but because it possesses an inherent entertainment value, even as repeated, Clockwork Orange-like viewings eventually numb the audience to the Horror itself.

25 years later, “never forget” had not survived the ordeal of senility. The posts being served to me by the algorithm were exclusively being made by sensitive young men, now old enough to grasp that they never took the Horror seriously, because it’s pretty obvious that the boomers stopped taking it seriously years ago. And so, in the hotel, on this creepy morning, as checkout and take-off approached, the repetition of the footage didn’t flatten the Horror, but finally made it real. The boomers have forgotten what we’re starting to remember.

I arrive at the airport, having passed through the flagless fields. Once again, without looking down at my algo, there is no sign the Horror ever occurred, its only physical legacy being the slowly moving line at the TSA. I board, scroll, stow my carry-on, and try not to think about it as the plane takes off for New York.

I talk briefly with the guy across the aisle. He says it’s his first time flying.

“Today’s your first flight?”

“Yeah.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

We think the same thing, but neither of us say it.