Boomsday

Boomsday (2007), a satirical novel by Christopher Buckley, pivots from Jonathan Swift’s classic eighteenth-century satire A Modest Proposal. Whereas Swift proposed solving the famine in Ireland by having the poor sell their babies to the wealthy as food, Buckley’s characters propose offering older Americans financial incentives to voluntarily commit suicide at seventy-five, before they become a financial burden on the country.

The book opens with a prologue set in the future, where a mob of young people assaults a retirement home and the older people playing golf there. The message “Boomsday Now!” is gouged into the green, referring to the date when the Baby Boomer generation begins retiring en masse, straining the economy because of the required Social Security payouts the day will trigger. The prologue closes with a casual mention that the Vice President has “shot yet another lawyer,” claiming that “this time” it was in self-defense.

We are then introduced to Cassandra Devine, who works by day as a “media trainer” preparing executives for interviews and other public relations-related activities, and who, on her own time, runs a blog stressing the looming economic disaster of Boomsday. Cass is dedicated to the point of having no life aside from her day job and her blogging. The action jumps back twelve years, to a teenage Cass who has just been accepted into Yale University—only to be informed by her parents that her father, Frank, raided her 529 account for seed money for his business. Her father suggests she join the military in order to pay for college, which Cass reluctantly does. While serving in Bosnia, Cass meets US Congressman Randolph Jepperson. The Congressman takes Cass out of the safe zone to explore, and they are attacked. The Congressman is injured when their vehicle rolls over a mine; he loses a leg, making him a hero.



Jepperson, feeling guilty about his actions, gets Cass her job, and the action moves back to the present where Cass—now romantically involved with Jepperson—perfects and publishes her “modest proposal” that the Boomer generation should be offered incentives in exchange for agreeing to commit voluntary suicide at age seventy-five in order to avoid the economic repercussions of having to pay for their entitlements. Cass intends this to be a provocative move to stir debate, not a serious proposal.

The concept of “Voluntary Transitioning” for older people is taken surprisingly seriously, and Jepperson, now a US Senator, gets the President to create a special commission to explore its viability. President Peacham is in the midst of a re-election campaign that isn’t going very well—helped, Cass is shocked to learn, by her own father, whose company, which erases negative search engine results, has made him rich; he lives the life of a rich CEO. Peacham is also supported by fundamentalist preacher Gideon Payne, who conflates the issue with his staunch pro-life views; Payne also opposes any sort of euthanasia. As the concept of Voluntary Transition becomes popular, sparking protests against senior citizens, Senator Jepperson sees his chance to ride the issue all the way to the White House. He announces his candidacy, helped by Cass’s employer, Terry Tucker.

The presidential campaign reaches a frenzy of political skullduggery. The Justice Department issues an arrest warrant for Cassandra; she is declared a fugitive. The protests become violent as masses of younger people demonstrate in favor of the Voluntary Transition. The proposal actually makes it to the Senate floor, helped by Senator Jepperson.



In the end, however, the issue collapses. Reverend Payne, also running for president, is found to have purchased software that predicts when people will die based on their habits, and his campaign ends in failure. Peacham wins re-election by a narrow margin. Cass’s father, Frank, resigns his position with the campaign on the eve of the election. He gets into legal trouble while racing his yacht, and his wife leaves him. Peacham asks the Justice Department to lift the warrant on Cass, and she is appointed the commissioner of Social Security over the protests of several groups convinced that her part in the Voluntary Transition debacle will make her sabotage the program on purpose.

Buckley positions Boomsday as the successor to Swift’s Modest Proposal, but his modern take on the idea of a horrific suggestion offered in apparent sincerity is updated by his assumption that, under the right political conditions, the proposal might be taken seriously. Where Swift assumed his suggestion would be met with horror even if taken seriously (as it was by some), Buckley suggests that even an insane idea, such as solving a financial crisis via mass suicide, could become an issue worthy of debate in the modern era. His use of the novel structure to deliver these ideas, as opposed to Swift’s framing of the argument in an essay, allows him to undermine both sides of the debate in ways that are both humorous and trenchant.