Voluntary Transitioning
The Minister is currently reading a Christmas present from the Minister’s Wife - Boomsday, a novel by Christopher Buckley, who brought a grateful world Thank You For Smoking.
The premise – set in the near future, America’s Social Security system is bankrupt as the first wave of the 77,000,000 Baby Boomers becomes entitled to a state pension; Generation Whatever rises up and proposes voluntary suicide at the age of 70 in return for up-front tax concessions, making America’s welfare system solvent for the first time in decades - is as bleakly humorous as Buckley’s previous work.
While Boomsday is a perfectly decent read, it doesn’t quite hit the nail as squarely on the head as Thank You For Smoking. Having now read 25 of the book’s chapters, I suspect that may be because I have yet to come across a character about whose ultimate fate I particularly care – from the American President down to the book’s protagonist, a 29-year-old female blogger/PR exec, each character is almost thoroughly unlikeable.
(Though I did like the $700 an hour lawyer rendered impotently speechless by a client telling the FBI the truth.)
Nevertheless, the book does contain the occasional hernia-inducing belly laugh.
For example, President Peachum is seeking to secure re-election amid the economic meltdown of stagflation and a succession of disastrous foreign military sortees:
By all indications, it was going to be an uphill battle. Thus far, the best his people had been able to come up with by way of a campaign slogan was, “He’s doing his best. Really.”
If only our politicians were so honest. However, my favourite belly laugh so far concerns those conflagrations:
The United States was currently engaged in six wars. The military was stretched to such a point that it was now safe for countries to invite the United States to attack them. The latest humiliation was Bolivia’s unilateral declaration of war.
It still makes me chuckle. And I have resolved to laugh more in 2008.
Even, if necessary, in inappropriate situations.