John Sutherland on a sinister plan for ageing baby boomers
"Artists," Ezra Pound declared, "are the antennae of the race." If so, it is the novelists among them who best foretell the political future. Aged 67, Anthony Trollope, the workhorse of Victorian fiction, wrote a novel called The Fixed Period, in which he imagined a "Britanula" of the late 20th century. On their 67th birthday (or deathday), citizens are "deposited" into a "college" (Necropolis) and euthanised.
In this fantasy about knackers' yards for humans, Trollope identified a growing social problem. People were living longer. The traditional safety nets - parish welfare, extended family groups - were fraying. Oldsters were in the way, morally troubling and economically burdensome. It would not be sorted until Lloyd George came up with the old-age pension, for 70-year-olds, in 1908.
There is no copyright in ideas for novels. Christopher Buckley's recycling of The Fixed Period, Boomsday, is currently riding high in the US bestseller lists.
Buckley's novel revolves, comically, around an intractable demographic problem: the vast cohort of Americans born between 1946 and 1964. "Boomsday" is 1 January 2008, when "the first of the nation's 77 million so-called Baby Boomers begin, aged 62, to retire with full Social Security benefits".
Buckley fantasises an America in which the president (a hilarious caricature of baby-boomer Bush) approves such measures as "a federal acid reflux initiative; a grandchild day-care initiative; visa requirement waivers for elder care; and a sure-to-be-controversial subsidy for giant flat-screen plasma TVs (for Boomers with deteriorating eyesight)". Meanwhile, the national coffers rattle emptily, the dollar goes down the tubes, and rioting youngsters storm gated retirement communities.
Forget fiction. The real-world facts are: 1) by 2016, the twin burdens of Social Security and Medicare will, at present rates of benefit, crush the American economy flatter than a hedgehog in a freeway fast-lane; 2) depriving retirees of their goodies is electoral suicide - they vote in larger numbers than any other cohort, and they vote on single issues; 3) hiking taxes to the necessary astronomic levels on the younger, still-working, cohort of Americans, to keep their elders in golf carts and winter cruises, is similarly suicidal.
The solution? Suicide, of course. An enterprising young PR person, Cassandra Devine, as clairvoyant as her name suggests, foresees gerontocratic apocalypse. She blogs a proposal for "voluntary transitioning" (ie, state-assisted suicide) for 65-year-olds. The idea takes off, and a war of the generations ensues.
Buckley's novel, like everything he writes, is laugh-out-loud funny. But no one will be laughing in the election year 2016. Looking back may well prove that George Bush's biggest presidential blunder was not Iraq, but his failure to reform Social Security (as he promised) on his re-election in 2004. But what the hell - he's a Boomer.
"Boomsday" is published by Twelve Books
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