Christopher Buckley - Boomsday

“What part of your ass needs kissing today, Frank?”

“All of it! I want in.”

“In what?”

“The campaign. The inner circle. No more Mickey Mouse ‘Owl inner circle’ bullshit and those phony ‘issue briefings by top officials.’ That’s for amateurs. I want to be in the room with you and the Man when the big decisions are made.”

“Is that all?” Bucky said mildly. “No air strikes or missile launches? Your own personal CIA daily briefer?”

“For the time being. After we win, I’ll want quite a bit more. Starting with the Treasury Department.”

“Why don’t we just send you the money instead?”

“That’s funny, Bucky. I’m really, really laughing. Do you do stand-up on the side?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Frank. You’re just another billionaire. According to Forbes, there are 371 of you out there.”

“Yeah, I saw. But this billionaire’s got you by the short ones, Bucky boy. And I’m about to give a good yank. Feel that? Want another?”

“You’re damaged goods, Frank. That Yale thing-bribing an Ivy League university not to flunk out your son? How do you think that would play at your Senate confirmation hearing?”

“Stepson. And who gives a shit? And who’s going to prove it was a bribe? You think Yale is going to come forward and say, ‘Sure we take bribes’? So I’m generous. That’s a matter of record. I give away tons of money. I give you money. I’ve just in the last week made significant donations to a number of Ivy League universities. You know what they say: Money’s like manure. Pile it up in one place…So don’t you worry about my Yale problem. That story got no legs. But nice try.”

Bucky said, “I can’t just wave a wand and make you head of the campaign.”

“Well, if I were you, Bucky boy, I’d start waving something-your dick, if it’ll do the trick. Otherwise you’re going to be reading a transcript of yourself telling me to hack into my daughter’s laptop and plant fraudulent, incriminating e-mails linking her to a serial murderer. Now, that would be a story with legs.”

“I’ll do what I can. But I don’t know if he’ll go for it.”

“Sure he will. Here’s what you tell him. Tell him exactly what I want. Up front. Tell him I want to be his secretary of the Treasury in the second term, and to that end, I will raise so much money for him during the campaign, you’ll be able to buy every minute of TV airtime between now and the election. If you can’t sell that, you’re in the wrong job.”

“I’ll do what I can. Good-bye, Frank. And Frank?”

“Yeah?”

“Fuck you.…?You’re right. It does feel good.”

Bucky hung up feeling oddly liberated. It was so seldom in politics one could be so frank.

Cass was wrangling volunteers.

She’d managed to find a few dozen sixty-something Baby Boomers who were willing to volunteer for Transitioning-though not until age seventy-five. Moreover, in return for their selfless acts of economic patriotism, they were demanding not only tax benefits well beyond the parameters of Cass’s original Transitioning plan, but also subsidized burial, mausoleums, full college tuition for their children, and retroactive medical payments going back to age twenty-one. Cass estimated that the aggregate economic impact of their Transitioning to the U.S. Treasury would be a negative $65 billion. (She would not emphasize this fact when they testified before the commission.)

“Where’d you find these people? Pyongyang?” Randy asked grouchily, looking over her list while plunging his chopsticks into a container of crispy shredded beef. He was generally grumpy with Cass and with Terry these days, owing to their North Korean golf tournament scheme. Oddly, the FBI, for whatever reason, hadn’t come around to grill them further. And so far it hadn’t leaked to the media. Allen Snyder was clearly worth well more than $700 an hour. Randy sniffed, “I imagine you’d find a lot of people in North Korea willing to sign up for Transitioning. At any age.”

“Since you ask, ” Cass said, “it wasn’t easy. In fact, it’s quite hard finding people of your generation willing to do something altruistic for their country.”

“Altruistic?” Terry said, nearly spewing his hot-and-sour soup. “That’s a laugh. I bet half of these volunteers you found are on eBay right now, seeing how much they could get for their body parts.”

“Your generation,” Cass said to Terry and Randy. “Not mine.”

Terry looked up from his Chiang Kai-shek chicken. “I suppose yours would do the right thing? Dream on. Every generation thinks it’s the most put upon in history. You’ve got your panties in a twist fretting about the deficit. My generation had real crises.”

“Oh, please,” Cass said. “Here it comes. Where were you when JFK was shot? If I hear one more Baby Boomer tell me, in mind-numbing detail, I think I’ll throw up.”

“I was in eighth grade,” Randy said. “We’d just come back from gym and-”

Cass said, “Prosecution rests.”

“It was a big deal,” Randy said. “What does your generation have to match it? The day Paris Hilton’s Sidekick was stolen?”

“Why is your generation so obsessed with itself?” Cass said. “You don’t think it was just as traumatic for all concerned when FDR died? After four years of a devastating world war?”

“Who’s FDR?” Terry said, winking at Randy.

“Sorry,” Cass said, not rising to the bait. “I forgot that Boomers don’t care about anything that happened before 1946.”

Terry said, “That’s right. We were too busy dealing with one disaster after another. JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, Vietnam-”

“Vietnam…remind me, was that the war that eighty percent of your generation dodged?”

“It wasn’t a very good war.”

“You were waiting for a better one to come along.”

“Still am,” Randy said.

Terry said, “Then there was Watergate-”

“Right. That would be the event that disillusioned you poor Baby Boomers. What a shock it must have been. Here you’d been brought up to believe that sort of thing had never gone on.”

“Inflation, the gas crisis…For your information, Miss Righteous Indignation, I spent most of the 1970s siphoning gas out of neighbors’ lawn mowers for my car.”

“Well, let’s award the Congressional Medal of Honor to Terry Tucker.”

“I hate to interrupt such a splendid jeremiad,” Randy said, “but Mitch Glint of ABBA called me today. He wants to make a statement at the next commission meeting.”

“What does he want?” Cass said.

“He just wants to make a little, you know, statement.”

“Let me guess. The Boomer Manifesto? What else do they want that you haven’t already given them? Toaster ovens? wall clocks? kitchen knives? Maybe 24/7 erectile dysfunction patches?”

Randy pursed his lips. “He mentioned something about a…he’s got this notion for a…”

“Just spit it out,” Cass said. “I’m beyond surprise at this point. Or dismay.”

“Well, it’s sort of a…an Arlington Cemetery, for Transitioners.”

Cass stared. “They want their own cemetery? And where would this field of honor go? No, wait, don’t tell me-here in Washington, on the Mall. Why not? We could tear down the Lincoln Memorial and put it there. What’s Lincoln done lately, anyway?”

“I don’t think they particularly care where it goes. Look, if it gets the most powerful Boomer lobby to come aboard and endorse Transitioning, what’s the big deal? Politics is negotiation. You have to give to get.”

“Why don’t you just offer to have every member of the Boomer generation cryogenically frozen-send the bill to my generation-and brought back to life once all diseases and global warming have been eliminated and there’s peace in the Middle East? Haven’t the Boomers suffered enough?”