Panorama

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THIS HAPPENED on the last day of the last year when we still felt safe, with the American skyline brilliantine, the entire panorama still rendered in its familiar postcard wholeness.

The two years bisected by this particular New Year’s Eve would come and go without fanfare, no shock in the timeline, no Dealey Plaza or Ambassador Hotel, no Miracle Mets or miracles on ice, no archdukes or mad monks, no anarchists or secessionists, no Treaty of Versailles, no surrender, no peace, no Sputnik or man on the moon, no heiresses turned into gun-toting molls, no Giants Win the Pennant! or Nixon Resigns!

The names of the infamous airports of the past became, at a distance, a roll call of crises: Tel Aviv, Kennedy, Sioux City, Hanoi, Tripoli, Athens, Entebbe, all those historical locales that conjured up grainy, United Press International photos of smuggled handguns, heroic pilots negotiating out the cockpit window while hijackers demanded unencumbered passage to Beirut, Havana. In San Juan, the narco dogs barked at every piece of luggage; in Geneva, armored personnel carriers stood sentry between the runways, a response to the vaguely threatening nature of our time.

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