The Cloud Over Manhattan.(United States national security issues)

I cranked my seat back as soon as we lifted off from Jackson-Sharpton Airport. (Boy, that still sounds funny. But with the one-year anniversary of the Waldorf-Astoria penthouse fire that martyred the two politicos now approaching, anyone using the old name "Laguardia" is likely to get his head handed to him.)

Thoroughly abraided from several hours of business-doing in the offices of New York City magazine swells, I shut my eyes and daydreamed about what my wife and children might be up to back in our neighborly little white-clapboard town in rural upstate. Between the pressure against my kneecaps from the seat in front of me, and the annoying new satellite-linked live radio that the airlines were so proud of playing over the intercom, my drowsing never got very deep.

The global news headlines rattled against my eardrums.

"Puerto Rican radicals fire on homes of the island's two newly elected U.S. Senators, calling them `collaborationist Toms.'"

"Marc Rich flees the United States a third time. Activists complain he's being selectively prosecuted after being named chairman of the Democratic Party. It's time for the `obsessives' to `give up the Puritan freak show' because the country is `ready to move on,' argues Rich's predecessor Terry McAuliffe, speaking from his Pennsylvania minimum security prison."

"In a shocking report from Britain, Harlow Devine, the Oxford genoset engineer and pediaculturer who made history by cloning himself and then adopting the resulting baby, was arrested yesterday on allegations of unlawful contact with a minor--his own clone. A spokeswoman for the group Auto-Love Liberation (ALL) decried `the criminalization of personal exploration and self-esteem.'"

"Meanwhile, as the last U.S. auto manufacturer closed down, President Gore sought to deflect blame. She was joined in Washington by her now-gray father, who told the press, `I've always counseled Karenna that dirty jobs and dirty money like those produced by auto manufacturing are better relocated overseas anyway, or preferrably off the planet. Besides, I've designed some wind-powered sailing cars that Karenna and I view as America's future."