Thursday in Cambridge was sunny and hot. The humidity is back here on the Charles and people are exercising early. Bikes are flying, women are jogging and rowers are pulling hard on their oars before it gets too hot. The Kennedy school is taking an infusion of new students in another mid-career management seminar. Our vivacious coordinator Marie-Christine had announced what was coming the day before at Announcement Time before our third period class. Our class loved Announcement Time. Marie-Christine admonished us to live in the present. She would take care of the future. There is a reception in the Forum where we have had breakfast the last few days. To accommodate a differently-abled student our large classroom is undergoing modification. We will be ejected so the workmen can install ramps. Marie-Christine will ensure we have a place and our name-cards will be installed. Learning, like the trains, will continue on schedule.For cases today we did the marginal success of government performance benchmarking in Oregon with Dr. Steve Kelman and the failure of the multi-agency www.business.gov in 1995 with Jane Fountain. She is quite good in trying to explain the collision of the internet and the institution of government. In the afternoon we did the Achille Lauro Highjacking with Dr. Phil Heymann. You may remember that one. It was 1985 The Gipper was President and the Cowboys ran his National Security Counsel. We were reintroduced to some old friends: John Poindexter, Ollie North at his finest, the FBI’s Buck Ravell. Charlie Allen, the Great Collector of our staff, even made a brief appearance as the National Intelligence Officer for  counter-terrorism. It was like old home week. I used to shower with Ollie over at the gym at Henderson Hall when his cowboy days were done and his legal problems were starting. He was the first one I remember to mention a nasty fellow named Osama bin Laden. He installed the famous security fence at his house because of Osama. In the Senate hearings after Iran-Contra he told the Senators that Osama was the most dangerous man they had never heard of. We have now. In some ways Ollie was a real visionary.The Case Study was straightforward enough. Some PLO fighters attempted to infiltrate Israel by traveling to the port of Ashdod by cruise liner and hit the IDF naval base. It was a meticulous plan, planned for a year and thus ready for implementation immediately after the Israeli air-strike on the PLO HQ in Tunis. Many passengers disembarked at al-Iskandria to travel overland to Cairo and see the Pyramids. Most would re-embark at Port Said, the head of the Suez Canal. In the suddenly under-populated ship the PLO team began to assemble their weapons ahead of schedule. The ship’s announcement system failed, a door was left unlocked and a purser opened a door to announce dinner and saw men putting machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades together. He ran, and the fighters realized they had to take the ship in order to escape.The seizure wasn’t the point of the operation. The fighters just wanted to get away. But there was a separate actor in the piece named Leon Klinghoffer. From the confines of his wheelchair he tried to organize the remaining passengers and crew to resist. He managed to irritate the high-jackers so much that they shot him and dumped his body overboard.That is where the politics got interesting. The Case Study had the communications from ship to shore. The Italians under Prime Minister Craxi were just as happy to have the whole thing go away. The Cowboys in the White House were itching to make an example of global terror. Arafat wanted it to go away, and the usual suspects at CIA, DIA and State Survey and Investigation wouldn’t agree on what faction was doing what to whom, and accordingly, just who the Cowboys were going to whack in righteous retaliation.The death of the American drove the rest of the story, which involved the American intercept of the EgyptAir aircraft which held the terrorists and their mastermind, Abdul Abbas. The cockpit of action moved to NAS Signonella and a high-testosterone stand-off between Delta Force and the Italian Carabinieri. There were 100 Delta commandos with weapons loaded and locked facing down an equivalent number of heavily armed Italians, the leaders screaming at one another as the Palestinians sat on the airliner.In the end, the Italians arrested the Palestinians who had been on the ship, slapped their wrists, and let the masterminds go free.The news this morning gives a sort of context to the whole process, since that is what this is. Americans died in the latest tit-for-tat strike at the Hebrew University, which responded to an IDF air-strike, which responded to something else in the long line of outrages of which Achille Lauro is part. In this one, President Bush says we not going to retaliate. That’s good, I suppose, although we may attack Iraq instead. Maybe I will understand this after completing the Week Two readings.After class I walked uptown to find some tonic. Wandering down Mass Ave I passed the very classy building of the Harvard Lampoon, narrow and triangular  to fit on the long oblong lot between two intersecting streets. I passed several churches and a van shaped like a pink pig towing two smaller pigs. They were parked behind a small econo-box with a plastic tree mounted on the top. A sign in the window admonished me that it got 48 miles to the gallon, and that I should help reduce out reliance on imported oil, a concept I thoroughly endorse. There were some earnest young people on the sidewalk.I found a grocery store within walking distance, a good thing, and several public buildings of impressive demeanor. The streets grew seedier as I got to Central Square. I thought I would press on and find out where the Club Middle East is located. That is the club where my cousin’s band Denali is playing tonight. I had a general idea from Katie at the Burger Cottage, but I thought I would walk it and find out when they were going to come on stage. The crowd got more and more diverse and I began to see more derelicts on the street as I walked along. Not bad, as things go, but clearly no longer the neighborhood of  Longfellow the poet.The Middle East is a typical shot-gun bar with small tables on one side and a long bar on the other and a hall in the back. There was a small working-class crowd present at 4:30 when I got there. A few barflies and a couple plump blonde girls having a beer and talking on cell phones. It was not busy. I walked to the back and an archway that led to the service area for the kitchen. I asked an Arabic-looking man if the band Denali was playing that night. He was nice. He said “I think so.” He looked at a calendar. “Yes” he said with a smile. “Tickets go on sale at 9:30 and they are on stage at midnight.”I looked at him blankly. “I get up at five,” I said. “Five AM. I don’t think this is going to work.””You could go take a nap and come back. That is what I do. I think they are going to sell out.””I hope so, but I still don’t think it will work. I’m not that young anymore. It is too bad. My cousin is in the band and I would like to say hello and wish him luck on the tour.””They should be here around six to do their sound checks. You might want to wait and see if you can see them then, hang out with the band for a while.””Thanks. I think I will. What is your name?” I put out my hand to shake his.”Najeeb” he said. “And welcome. Here you are our family, too.” I took his hospitality to be in the gracious tradition of Lebanon, the place from which the Israeli’s ejected the PLO and why the Palestinians felt they had to strike back through the Italian Cruise Liner.I set up camp at the bar and did a couple chapters of reading. I nursed a vodka tonic and thought about systems integration and regional politics. On the cruise I had wound up staring over the rail and talking to the pretty red-head from my seminar. She was originally from Syria. She was Christian and had married young to a Muslim man, her love. We talked about how Damascus had been the city of Saladin, the great Arab general and courtly cavalier of Islam. In one of his battles to eject the Crusaders he fought one of the Kings of England. Noting that the Englishman had lost his horse, he instructed his retainers to provide the downed royal a new horse. A class act. Damascus had been a city of tolerance, home to Jew and Christian but ruled under the Star and Crescent. My classmate looked Irish, and she was frequently mistaken for that nationality. I thought to myself that the Crusader presence had not been completely removed.Around six I walked back into the dark cave where the band would play. A young twenty-something girl was instructing a young man on the technical tricks of the set up. She stood in front of the mike on the stage and said “Test. Test. Test. Test.” She knew the range in which Denali’s female vocalist operated and tried to optimize the mix, tweeking the system a few db’s in the upper register. In the light the cave looked seedy. Day-glow icons were painted on the wall, some of the plaster was coming down and electrical cables snaked everywhere. The band was late, she said, stuck in traffic somewhere in The Big Dig. It was getting past dark and roadies from some of the other bands were carrying in guitars and drum-sets. I realized I wasn’t going to connect with the band, so I jotted a note on a business car and left it with the sound lady to pass to my cousin. I told him I hoped Denali knocked them dead.They cranked up the system and the sound was round and pure and clear and penetrating. I imagined the cave in my mind, no longer seedy, alit with strobe and blue spot and pulsing with flesh and sweat and lubricated with alcohol.There was a time I would have felt right at home in The Middle East. But that would have been back when they took down the Achille Lauro.