Today’s selection demonstrates that, while some of the images might age, the theme, sadly, never seems to go out of date. Notice, by the way, the color of the balloon John Lennon carries in the opening demonstration.

As I said earlier this week, the events in Iran separate the idealists from the realists. And what I’ve realized about myself is that I’m something of a hybrid: realist when it comes to relations between states, and idealist when it comes to the relation between citizen and state.

I’m not sure whether and how we can influence the outcome in Iran for the better. In fact, I’m skeptical we can. But I do hope that the folks out in the street there demonstrating manage to bring Power to the People:

Today’s selection comes a week late, since it talks about D-Day, and the debt the French owe to us ‘Marruhcunz (as I learned how to say in the Big D). And no, the song isn’t performed by a Fox News commentator, but by Michel Sardou, a French cultural rarity: the right-wing artist. The opening stanza about says it all:

Today’s selection selected itself. It’s been a while since it was so easy to find something topical, actually, and it comes from one of the great bands, one that managed to build on its initial derivative gimmick to end up with an original sound that can only be described as, well, the heavy, heavy monster sound of Madness.

I missed the one chance I had to see them play live, at the old Concert on the Pier series, in ’83, it must have been. If memory serves correctly, I’d just gotten grounded after Pops found out about my 14-year-old fondness for nightclubs. He actually came out looking for me the night he heard I had plans to go see a band at the Ritz with some friends. Luckily, by the time he elbowed his way to the bar there, we’d already made it over to Danceteria, or DT’s as we called it, home to some of my fondest adolescent memories. Poor Dad, he couldn’t win, because I was back at it again as soon as I was off curfew.

Anyway, even though President Barack Obama is already on his way to the shores of Normandy, I can’t resist taking one last ride on the Night Boat to Cairo:

Today’s selection was oddly enough almost last week’s selection, but I decided that it didn’t have enough to do with foreign affairs to really warrant using it. Then this week, I saw its most famous lyric referenced three times: by Cheryl Rofer in a post on North Korea, by Tom Ricks in a post on Pakistan, and by Matthew Yglesias in a post on, well, partisan domestic politics. But you get the picture.

The fact that I just saw Kris Kristofferson — albeit overdubbed in French — in Sam Pekinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid a few days ago sealed the deal.

I was initially going to go with this complete version sung by a pre-Outlaw-era Waylon Jennings. But there’s something a bit disconcerting seeing ole Waylon straitjacketed by the Nashville star system, especially on a song that’s all about the freedom of the road. So instead I took this incomplete clip from Dennis Hopper’s cult film, The Last Movie, sung by Kristofferson himself and musically a whole lot more interesting, to boot.

I’ve never seen the movie, but a film-buff friend just told me he’s heard it was hard to watch. That sounds about what I’d imagine Dennis Hopper and friends in the Andes with $1 million in 1970 would add up to. The film, which was shot in Peru, is about a film being shot in Peru, which explains the final bit of the scene below. So there’s a bit of an international and intercultural angle, after all, to Me and Bobby McGee:

Today’s selection comes from Pat Martino, the man I consider to be the gold standard of jazz guitarists and — as my guitar teacher’s teacher — my musical Godfather. The song itself came to me as I was running alongside the river, thinking about nothing in particular. But it seems to wordlessly express the feeling I get from President Barack Obama’s first months in office, with the composition’s speed and momentum that comes of leaning into the rhythm broken up by the stops and starts and broken stride of its quirky, halting middle section.

The quintessential recording of this comes off the “Live!” record, performed in 1972 at Folk City in NY’s Greenwich Village. Remarkably, Martino suffered a stroke in 1980, and as a result of the surgical intervention, experienced amnesia, completely forgetting how to play guitar. He subsequently relearned with the help of friends and his old recordings. So the video below is the second incarnation of Pat, so to speak.

That, too, made me think of America, relearning how to be itself after eight long years of amnesia under the Bush administration. There will be moments where the current flows more smoothly, and others where rapids and eddies make the going a bit more difficult, as we wind our way down The Great Stream:

Today’s selection began with a reference to the Falklands War in this video that Andrew Sullivan posted. That got me looking for a good video of the Madness song, Blue Skinned Beast, which turned out to be pretty fruitless. A few random associations later and that had become any good reference to Thatcher-era England. And for reasons that I can’t fully explain, because there are other candidates that might seem more obvious, that led me straight to Linton Kwesi Johnson.

The poem on which the song is built takes the form of a letter home from a young Carribean man in a London jail. Having been stopped with his brother by the police while simply waiting for the bus on their way home, the man winds up in jail for murder after defending his brother from a beating. The song perfectly captures its historical moment while remaining eerily relevant today, with the current economic downturn already having an effect on attitudes towards immigrants and foreign workers.

But the age of decay in which it was written — when Britain, and the West, seemed poised on the brink of falling to the “second tier,” as the fellow speaking at the 4:29 mark of the video in Sullivan’s post puts it — seems a part of the distant past.

If there’s a difference between now and then for me, that’s it. Things might still melt down, but they won’t crumble. There are still pressures on the system, and there are still injustices. There are still guys like Kwesi Johnson’s Sonny writing letters back home, if they’re lucky enough to be granted that privilege. But the West appears to be on more solid ground than at the time of Sonny’s Lettah:

Today’s selection is a movie scene, since this week saw a bunch of foreign policy bloggers come up with their Top Ten lists of films that “tell us something about international relations more broadly,” as Stephen Walt, who kicked things off, put it. Sam Roggeveen came up with his list here, and has the rest of the links as well.

If the criteria didn’t include being a good film, I’d have mentioned the Lord of the Rings, essentially the story of building ad hoc alliances in a world where multilateral institutions have fallen into decline. And if you could somehow edit out all of the close ups of Elija Woods’ eyes misting up, the Lord of the Rings might have made a good film. As it stands, though, those close ups stretched it out into three awful ones.

The John Woo flick I wrote up this week, Red Cliff, makes a good candidate. The emphasis is more on military strategy than statecraft and diplomacy, but the latter two are in there as well.

Still, if I had to pick one — because I couldn’t possibly come up with ten — and one that hasn’t yet been mentioned, I’d nominate Planet of the Apes, the original version. Although the movie is mainly considered a dystopian sci fi flick, I’d argue that the structure of the apes’ society is essentially a critique of the modern national security state. And the way in which that society’s past has become a closely guarded state secret has obvious implications about how challenging official narratives about outsiders threatens the self-defined boundary — and in turn the survival — of the militarized state.

As an aside, there’s a doctoral dissertation waiting to be written about Charlton Heston as cultural icon, explaining how the same man who appeared in Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green in the space of five years went on to be the symbol of the survivalist right. As another aside, the premise of The Omega Man, described in this news report from the movie, is pretty timely in light of the swine flu scare.

Be that as it may, here’s the famous final scene of Charlton Heston and Linda Harrison’s beachside jaunt, which drives home the critique of the militarized state pretty poignantly. The planet they blew up turned into The Planet of the Apes:

Today’s selection is a stretch as far as foreign policy themes go, since it deals with my hometown of New York, and not some far-off, distant land. But to an expatriot in Paris, New York sometimes feels like a far-off, distant land. And since I’m heading back on Sunday for a ten-day visit, it’s a stretch I’m willing to make.

While I’m gone, Matt Eckel and Matt Dupuis from Foreign Policy Watch will be keeping things lively here, starting on Monday. If you’re not already familiar with their stuff, click through and take a look. You’ll see why we thought of them. I’d also like to thank them both in advance for being willing to help out.

To sign off, I wanted to find a song about going home to New York, and this one really captures that feeling of excitement mixed with nostalgia for me. I’ve also always had a soft spot for Billy Joel, despite all the obviousreasons not to. Part of that had to do with the fact that he had amajor foothold in the family’s playlist growing up, back when there wasonly one stereo per household. Part of that had to do with the pianoriff that opens “Stiletto.” And part of that had to do with the factthat Liberty De Vitto was his drummer.

I won’t be taking a Greyhound on the Hudson River Line. Instead, I’ll be hopping on a 747. But I’m definitely in a New York State of Mind:

Today’s selection is from a band that I first remember seeing thirty years ago on an episode of What’s Happening. This is somehow true.

As for why I selected it, it has to do partly with the hat the drummer is wearing, partly with the way Skunk Baxter’s swivel chair has a front-to-back rocking mechanism built into it, and partly with the fact that part of my calling in life is to make sure that bands like the Doobie Brothers don’t get dismissed as bizarre epiphenomena of the Seventies.

But it has mostly to do with the growing conviction I’ve had over the past couple weeks that, after a few decades of being passed over as passive consumers, the people are about to play a growing role as actors in international affairs. Their demands, their grievances, their anger will all take on a more central role, at a time when the state will be least able to do much about it.

Pessimistic? I’m not sure. We’ve had such a long run of false growth that the very idea of scarcity seems frightening. But in times of social upheaval, there’s often a recalibration of values, with essential skills and assets reclaiming their privileged positions. That will be a painful correction, but a necessary one.

I also think that despite all of the advances in communications technology, we’re about to see a return to the world stage of one of the oldest methods of speaking truth to power, namely masses of people, Takin’ It to the Streets:

I couldn’t find true video of it, but today’s selection is one of the more beautiful songs off one of Tom Waits’ more beautiful albums. I was bitten by the vagabond bug and began dreaming of the great escape at a relatively young age. So this sort of imagery was already talking to me when I first heard it as a teenager: