After hearing that some maniac managed to creep into George Harrison's house and stab the Beatle in the chest, I braced myself. For over a year we'd been hearing about all the varieties of hell that were bound to break loose once the clock turned from 11:59 to midnight on Dec. 31. To kill the 20th century by murdering a Beatle seemed, on brief reflection, a choice as sophisticated as sick. George's would-be killer had an archetypal imagination. "Fasten your seatbelts," this incident seemed to call, echoing one of the waning century's most durable Bette Davis lines, "it's going to be a bumpy ride."
Now we know that George's stabbing was not a harbinger of things to come. New Year's Eve rolled around and, in spite of warnings, premonitions and predictions to the contrary, nothing awful happened. In the plazas and squares of the world's great cities, television cameras scanned one scene after another of sardine jubilation. Clocks flipped, and even in Russia, where virtually every day is Y2K, all was, if not calm, then boisterously bright. There was no crisis. There was no Apocalypse. No end of days.
Since then, most commentators have put an "aw, shucks" face on things. Everyone is, of course, relieved — if not amazed — that things went smoothly. So smoothly that, for the first 48 hours of the New Year, there were a few folks who, at the risk of seeming like sour grapes, wondered aloud if the air of impending crisis we'd been breathing for the last year was a hoax. A chorus of nerdish experts was dutifully summoned to testify that the world's banal transition from one century to the next was thanks, in large part, to their proactive trouble-shooting. They had a point: Like the man in Alaska who claimed that hitting himself in the head with a hammer kept alligators away, the experts had nothing to show for their efforts — and nothing is what most people wanted.
Lost in this coverage, though, were the voices that lent the days leading up to New Year's their charge of gathering menace. Throughout 1999, it became clear that many of us find a perverse kind of hope in the contemplation of collective catastrophe. For some this was an article of religious faith. On Jan. 1 would come the Rapture — true believers were on their way to heaven. Others, like the New Age liberals at the Utne Reader in Minnesota, looked forward to the cascading self-destruction of computer networks and saw a rebirth of community — neighbors getting to know one another in the wake of a techno sucker punch. Finally, there were those for whom our fin de sicle was an excuse to finally live the dream of Swiss Family Robinson — except that instead of a treehouse they hunkered in bunkers, with plenty of guns, ammo and Chef Boy-R-Dee.
For all these people, the relentless optimism of New Year's morning must have been a disappointment. Security forces, from Las Vegas to Jerusalem, successfully squelched all manner of terrorist plots. Thanks to an entrepreneurial army of techno-consultants, our cyber infrastructure continued humming. And, depending on your calendar, God, whoever she may be, had evidently given us all a Get Out of Jail Free card for another 1,000 years. Now, more than ever before in human history, our lives were mediated by experts.
Even George Harrison had something to be thankful for. His attacker's knife missed a vital artery and complete recovery was expected. Although the other surviving Beatles sent discreet best wishes, no one, for once, even suggested a reunion. Like it or not, there was going to be a future — and it was going to be up to someone else to invent it.