by Christopher Buckley

Twelve. 322 pages. $24.99.

By G. Wayne Miller
Journal Staff Writer

A good case can be made for P.J. O’Rourke, but for my money, Christopher Buckley is America’s pre-eminent political satirist. The only others playing in his league are Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart — they’re TV, of course — and the people behind the enviably irreverent site whitehouse.org.

Boomsday, Buckley’s latest, comes several books after his 1994 Thank You for Smoking, which translated into one of the funniest (and incisive) movies of 2006. Like “A Modest Proposal,” in which Jonathan Swift, the father of modern satire, suggested the Irish could earn money and control population by selling their children to be eaten, Boomsday is premised on a simple and (initially) seemingly ridiculous notion: what if in the not-too-distant future the government offered incentives to aging baby boomers who agreed to kill themselves so that younger wage-earners wouldn’t be stuck with the staggering costs of their elders’ old age?

Somebody has to pay for this unsavory bulge in the demographic snake, and why should it be boomers’ children and grandchildren, the innocent byproducts of their kin? Surely, FDR did not have this generational inequity in mind when he created Social Security. Surely, it is boomers’ patriotic duty to fix the mess they created.

Such is the brainchild of (blond, attractive, witty) 29-year-old Cassandra Devine, a PR and marketing executive with a tortured past who, charged up on Red Bull and sleep-deprived delusions of grandeur, spends many of her nights posting to her wildly popular blog. Rather than being laughed off, her proposal that “resource hogs” and “wrinklies” kill themselves at a suitable age spawns a growing movement to seriously consider “voluntary transitioning.” Soon, it is front-page news and the subject of a national commission — and a central theme in a presidential election. But will boomers go for it? You bet, at least some of them. Why, the incentives include free drugs, subsidized burials, mausoleums, and a national “transitioning” cemetery honoring these courageous euthanasic heroes. In the face of imminent mortality, boomer greed prevails again.

Once you accept the notion that “the line dividing reality from absurdity in this country has finally disappeared,” as one of Boomsday’s characters says (a cogent argument can be made that this is already happening in real life), almost anything is possible — and everything is fair game. Few escape Buckley’s deft skewering: not the Catholic Church, Southern evangelicals, the media, big business, and even Cass’ generation, which Buckley considers as self-serving as the boomers Ms. Devine targets.

Buckley, who lives in Washington (and New York), saves his deepest cuts for his portrayal of President Riley Peacham, a barely disguised caricature of our current leader (for what it’s worth, Peacham has already wound up under “presidents” on Wikipedia). Imagine President Bush’s policies persisting for a few more years and this is what you might get, in Peacham’s own words: “I’m fighting four wars — and looks like another on the way, in goddamn Nepal . . . Florida just lost another two feet of waterfront . . . they just found another tunnel under the Mexican border, this one a four-lane highway . . . Pakistan and India are going at each other like a couple of wet cats . . . CIA’s telling me Israel’s preparing to launch nuclear weapons at ****** Mecca. Mecca!”

Character development and plot are not Buckley’s strong suits, although there is no requirement for them in a book like this. And Buckley too often falls in love with acronyms, a sophomoric literary device. But these are quibbles, not serious flaws. Buckley is so right on with his satire that his (venial) sins can be forgiven. And while good satire does not need to elicit an audible response, I laughed at several passages, notably those involving a Catholic monsignor and his unlikely friend, a Bible-thumper. Bring on the movie. I see Robin Williams and Nathan Lane with leading roles.

Like Buckley, who was born in 1952, I am a Boomer — and I have long harbored a sort of self-loathing involving some of the excesses of my generation, which, once upon a time, set out to change the world . . .with peace and love, not Hummers and Botox. We’ve dropped the ball on many counts, but we have at least one outcome worth celebrating: Buckley’s wicked pen.