BOOK REVIEW
March 19, 2007
My Fellow Boomers, Time to Transition
If Christopher Buckley played fair, he would wait for things to happen before making fun of them. But he prefers to position himself just ahead of the curve, somewhere in the scantly distant future, the place where fanciful extrapolations of reality are born.

The title of Boomsday refers to the point at which this generation becomes eligible for Social Security - and ready to demolish the federal budget. So the book invents a prophetic heroine named Cassandra Devine who sounds a rallying cry to her fellow 20-somethings. Stop paying taxes, she urges, and create financial incentives for boomers to commit suicide.

Even at its breeziest, "Boomsday" features wickedly plausible ingredients like a Capetown-to-Rio Rolex Challenge for yachts and a boomer-advocacy organization whose office lobby has been given the brushed-steel look of a Sub-Zero refrigerator. From its jailed reporters who form a "Pulitzer Nation" (wearing "do-rags made from expensive hosiery") to tax exemptions for Segways and cosmetic surgery, not to mention a proposed set of celebrity-endorsement suicide ads ("like the milk ads, only they're drinking poison"), this satire combines the serious and the ridiculous with dead-on aplomb.

Speaking of dead, even the book's morbid premise is given a feasible ring. "We can fool some of the diseases some of the time," Randy proclaims during a campaign speech, "But we can't fool all of them all of the time." Mr. Buckley can be funny even when he isn't joking, though not even he can laugh away the problem that gives "Boomsday" its premise.
The New York Times