It may have been the Year of the Horse in China, but 2002 was the Year of the Jacko here in the States. Even though Michael Jackson's most perplexing public stunt occurred overseas, there was no better depiction of the freakishly frightening year Americans endured than the image of mad Michael jiggling his squirming kid over the balcony railing of a Berlin hotel room. In many respects, in 2002 we felt like that suspended infant: on the verge of tumbling to an untimely death; unable to comprehend the extent of impending danger; helplessly dependent on the grip of unpredictable paws.

Like Jacko's baby-dangling incident, 2002 was a huge scare -- a year of anxiety, suspicion, and mistrust. It was a year of fin-walking fish, smallpox FAQs, and saber-rattling. It was a year when an art-school student could stencil FEAR on 37 black boxes, deploy them around a Manhattan subway, and find himself charged with "reckless endangerment" and "disorderly conduct." It was a year when three Middle Eastern medical students could bait a nosy, eavesdropping nurse with empty statements about soon-to-be mourning Americans and promptly find themselves chased down by the police and detained for 17 hours. It was a year of taking threats seriously.

In fact, 2002 was the year of a knockdown, drag-out battle for the title of America's Most Serious Threat. Not surprisingly, Al Qaeda earned that ill-famed distinction, since we'd already witnessed the bloody hell the terrorist group's hunger for virgins and exalted martyrdom could inflict on a superpower's soil. Saddam Hussein finished second, chiefly because he doesn't overtly confess his sins like Osama bin Laden; the bronze went to a sick sniper team in the DC area. Pedophilic priests and greedy CEOs round out the top five, followed by surreptitious menaces like the midterm elections, vacation cruises, the USA Patriot Act, and John Poindexter.

So after a year of trepidation, unease, and malaise both at home and abroad, the media types who three years ago wouldn't shut up about what to name our nascent decade now have an answer: the Uh-oh's. It's certainly more fitting than the Naughties, the Zeros, the Aughts, or the M&M's; at least "uh-oh" communicates the sense of threat Americans have endured since 9/11. Uh-oh describes the moment after something precious has dropped, right before the damage has been checked. A person who's previously been robbed might utter uh-oh after awakening to a thump in the night. Uh-oh often precedes a scream or a sigh. Uh-oh sounds a lot like now.

FROM START to finish, 2002 played out like an apocalyptic game of chicken. At the end of 2001, still reeling from the blow of September 11, America found itself engaged in a supranational shouting match: Osama threatens megadeath, we threaten justice; Osama spits abhorrence at the West and invective about Israel, we mark him an evildoer and take out his Taliban sponsorship.

Then, nine and a half days before 2002 rolled in, a mangy airplane passenger tried to ignite his explosive sneaker on a flight from Paris. Ultimately, the crew sedated the scrubby suspect, but his sinister stunt was a firm reminder that there were still plenty of reasons to be afraid. That fear boiled over into paranoia about the first New Year's Eve post-9/11: we fretted over the notion of a detonated nuclear device melting Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve into Night of the Living Dead. So the cops carried radiation detectors around Times Square while we watched and waited for the New Year's Eve ball to drop. Fortunately, nothing else did.

Yet Osama and his skunk-beard were still skulking around the globe. And so our government repeatedly reminded us that we remained a nation under siege -- sleeper cells might even be creeping around your neighborhood. In March, Homeland Security Adviser Tom Ridge, a barrel-necked former guvahnah entrusted with the unenviable task of keeping the country calm, divided terrorist threats into color-coded categories: red signified "Severe Risk of Terrorist Attack"; green meant "Low"; and so on. Unfortunately, the chart was icy comfort: we've lived in yellow ("Elevated") ever since, with the exception of two orange ("High") weeks around the anniversary of 9/11.

Such a permanent state of "elevation" can desensitize a country to danger -- especially a nation that's legendary for its collective ADD. So a warning system alone wasn't enough to keep us conscious of potential terrorist threats. Ridge and his peers wanted us to stay vigilant and, in some respects, to stay uneasy: everyone from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to FBI director Robert Mueller to Vice-President Dick Cheney pled the "when, not if" line when queried about the likelihood of future attacks. A May cover story in the New York Times Magazine echoed the same sentiment: writer Bill Keller spoke with sundry atomic-energy experts, physicists, and researchers about the potential risk of a nuclear assault. His findings are best expressed in the piece's subhead: "Experts on terrorism and proliferation agree on one thing: Sooner or later, an attack will happen here. When and how is what robs them of sleep." Keller told the Times Magazine, "I asked everyone I interviewed whether there was one particular scenario that kept them awake at night . . . everyone had one."

The media also proffered their share of worst-case scenarios: suitcase nukes, car bombs, dirty bombs, contaminated water supplies, speedboats rigged with explosives, scuba-diving scourges, hijacked jetliners plunging into power plants, biological-weapon-spewing crop-dusters, over-the-shoulder missiles, cyanide on the subway, anthrax in your soup, smallpox in your spit. And with every holiday, the chatter rose to a shriek: the Fourth of July, the 9/11 anniversary, Halloween, Thanksgiving (on which terrorists actually attacked a tourist hotel in Kenya and attempted the same on an Israeli passenger jet).

Somewhere along the line, the Bush administration used these revelatory scenarios as a call to action against another adversary across the ocean, a prickly prong of the "axis of evil": an unshorn evildoer named Saddam Hussein. Kids recognized Saddam as Satan's concubine in South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999), so pretty much every American could concur that Saddam was bad. But not everyone, especially America's allies, agreed that attacking him was in the world's best interests.

Nevertheless, Bush bullied the UN for support against Saddam's "outlaw regime," which had repeatedly sidestepped the organization's weapons' inspectors; meanwhile, brinkmanship ensued as the Bush administration made its own thinly veiled threats, decrying the country as a "lethal" and "aggressive" nation that aids terrorists and actively seeks, if not already possesses, nuclear munitions. At the time of this writing, CNN was reporting that a "war decision could come by February." It's enough to make you feel like you're in the hands of a madman named Michael.

IT'S SICKENINGLY appropriate that Ben Affleck -- People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" -- busted out the heroics to play a CIA agent in a Tom Clancy disaster flick called The Sum of All Fears. 2002 was nothing if not a manifestation of fear.

A pair of serial-killing riflemen -- John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Salvo -- in the Washington, DC, area seemed to crib a page from a Hollywood script, gunning down strip-mall shoppers as though they were clay pigeons. Residents grew petrified, avoiding parking lots and gas stations, many afraid to leave the cozy confines of their household encampments. In the end, the snipers' coup wasn't so much claiming 13-plus victims over the course of three weeks as haunting thousands during that same period.

Corporate scandal also haunted the homeland. At sinking conglomerates like Enron and WorldCom, company execs who had pissed away their employees' retirement funds wondered why they were being dragged away in cuffs. Compounding these appalling bankruptcies were cooked-book accusations at other firms, including Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, Johnson & Johnson, Global Crossing, Citigroup, and Kmart. Even Martha Stewart, Queen of the Doilies, became mired in insider-trading allegations, and had to resign her post on the NYSE board.

Adding to all this insecurity were the ominous happenings at institutions in which people tend to seek refuge in unsettled times. The Catholic Church was crumbling in Boston. The government, which claims to be our defender in the mess, whittled away our privacy with the USA Patriot Act. Even McDonald's, a consolation for some, was fighting off lawsuits brought by obese teens; by year's end it was posting unprecedented losses, and considering closing down stores.

HERE'S SOME other scary stuff. From now on, the government will be studying your grocery receipts, Internet transactions, and bookstore purchases. Should you decide to protest it in Washington, you'll be videotaped. Cloned babies could be born any day now. Reports from the UK say that Iraq's UN report on its weapons capabilities failed to account for "four tons of nerve gas, 8.5 tons of anthrax, and assorted nuclear-bomb parts."

Can you say "Uh-oh"?

Camille Dodero can be reached cdodero[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: December 27, 2002 - January 2, 2003