In an attempt to keep this at least somewhat interesting, I figured I’d comment on a recent read- Boomsday by Christopher Buckley. This is the same author who wrote Thank You For Smoking, later made into a pretty good movie. As the title suggests, the book deals with the Baby Boomer generation, that generation born more or less right after WWII. If you remember your history, it was WWII that pulled the US out of the Depression. Upon returning home, soldiers found themselves in a somewhat unique position- they had both the ways and means as well as plenty of opportunity to settle down, start families, buy houses, all that good stuff. The result- babies, and lots of them. This generation gets pretty well blasted in the book- personally, I don’t know of anyone who lives quite to the excess of these folks- gated communities, spending social security funds on private golf courses and BMWs, but then again, I don’t really know that many Baby Boomers. But the main focus of all this is the righteously screwed-up Social Security system. Enter one Cass Devine, who, apart from sounding like a porn star, proposes a way to fix the system that would make Jonathan Swift blush. The funny thing is, it would actually work. She proposes massive tax breaks and perks for people who choose to shuffle off this mortal coil at age 70, in a voluntary suicide. Nothing necessarily gross, extreme or messy, either. But at any rate, this would, well, eliminate much of the burden on people paying into social security, and the system would then even itself out. Not to mention a good deal of other savings, too. I am not certain I would advocate this, but the numbers are easy enough to figure, and are not dependent on the morality of the issue. Wiping out half the population would increase the resources available to the remaining half, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.
Needless to say, the suggestion provokes a massive controversy in Washington, with a whole new outlet for what is unfortunately in many cases pro-life venom. But as the story progresses, even this ‘modest proposal’ becomes secondary to a kind of black comedy about the political machine in this country. In a three-hundred-odd page book on Washington politics, the word democracy does not occur once. The strange thing is, it isn’t missed. This, apparently, is the backstabbing, opportunistic way our government works. What the people think is what the press spins- a term meaning to manipulate public opinion. Turn monsters into saints, or vice versa. And here I thought Franz Kafka wrote fiction... At any rate, this was a good book- I’d recommend it. But it does point to many of the problems in government. People feel that the government does not represent them. Yet the government, ideally, is supposed to do that. People feel that they have no voice in government, and subsequently do not care. And politics is slightly less complicated than neuroscience, although not by much. Thus the world of politics is further insulated from (dare I say it) your Joe The Plumbers out there who have no real idea where there tax dollars are going. I know I sure as hell don’t! The system in place really is that bad. The question is, will anything short of an economic apocalypse save us from ourselves? Probably not. But then, when the time comes, humanity will no doubt continue on, perhaps the wiser for the mistakes of its so-called leaders.
No comments:
Post a Comment