The decade is almost at an end, and it’s high time you replace “The Millennium” with “Boomsday” on your List of Apocalypses that likely already includes inconvenient truths, second comings, the Infocalypse and the Red Sox winning the World Series again.

Two years from now, in 2010, the first of America’s 76 million baby boomers will begin to retire, quickly squandering what’s left of Social Security leaving those of us born after 1964 to struggle with rising taxes and no hope of welfare in our old age. At best, protesters will march on the National Mall once again, but it’s more likely that the video game-obsessed youth of today will turn violent and hit the boomers where it hurts: burning down their golf courses and looting the pink flamingos from the pristinely groomed yards of their Florida retirement homes. At least, that’s the future as envisioned by writer Christopher Buckley in his latest political satire Boomsday.

A baby boomer himself, Buckley mock-examines the crisis through the eyes of his cynical thirtysomething protagonist Cassandra Devine. Devine is a once academically promising beauty who, after a series of unusually unfortunate mishaps (that include her father spending her Yale tuition money, and her being blown up in a Kosovan minefield), finds herself working for a Washington, D.C. PR agency that specializes in enhancing the image of terrorists and mink farmers. Like all jaded Gen Xers, at night she goes back to her empty apartment, heats up a microwave dinner and vents her sociopolitical frustrations on her blog.

After one very late night, and a Red Bull-fueled online rant proposing that baby boomers kill themselves at age 65 in return for tax breaks to lighten the load on her generation, she wakes up to find the country in chaos. Within hours, Congress is actually debating her proposal, and when she’s not in federal prison, hiding from the law, or being accused of inciting murder, Devine finds herself at the center of the taskforce for “Voluntary Transitioning” backed by a one-legged Presidential candidate.

Buckley’s past as a speechwriter for Bush senior serves him well once again, as he offers us a glimpse into the harebrained decision-making that lies deep within the White House walls, and presents a thinly veiled cast of fictional politicians desperately, indecisively trying to make choices with certainty. Combining impressive political detail with his characteristically surreal wit, Buckley makes the idea of boomers leaping off cliffs like lemmings seem alternately brilliant, hilarious and at times downright sensible. Above all, he gives equal time to both sides of the generational divide, citing boomers and busters for a shortsighted absurdity that will have you laughing out loud.

Whether your coming of age moment was defined by Watergate or vitamin water, Boomsday is the perfect note on which to end a summer of relentless political pandering.

–Julia Clarke