Last week the Senate actually did something good. It unanimously passed a bill (S. 3104) to authorize funding for Radio Free Asia (RFA) on a permanent — as opposed to a temporary — basis. Co-sponsored by Dick Lugar, R-Ind., Ted Kaufman, D-Del., Al Franken, D-Min., Dan Inouye, D-Hawaii, Jim Risch, R-Idaho, and Jim Webb, D-Va., the bill “indicates the importance we place on the free flow of information, particularly in countries noted for their lack of an open press,” said Lugar.

RFA has a shorter pedigree than Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which date back to the early Cold War and now broadcast to the former Soviet republics and the Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan region. And RFA bears very little resemblance to the 1951 effort to broadcast into Mao’s China. Like RFE/RL, that effort was initially funded by the CIA. But unlike RFE/RL, it ended after only two years, because while many Eastern Europeans and Russians owned shortwave receivers, few Chinese did. And shortwave is the only radio signal that can penetrate a large continent from outside its borders.

“We care about the small people.” Thus spake Carl-Henric Svanberg, trying last week to plug the gusher of bad press pummeling British Petroleum. He even cited President Obama as another dignitary willing to condescend to the Lilliputians of the Gulf Coast. One New Orleans resident spoke for all red-blooded Americans when he retorted, “We’re not small people. We’re human beings. They're no greater than us. We don’t bow down to them.”

Thanks to strong defense from American goalie Tim Howard and a fumble by his English counterpart, Robert Green, America did not lose its first game in this year’s World Cup. Instead, the match in South Africa’s Royal Bafokeng Stadium was a draw: 1–1. And as ESPN’s Jemele Hill put it, “The draw was a gift.”

Does this mean Joe the Plumber will soon be getting out his vuvuzela to cheer on Bob Bradley and the team? Not really. Americans enjoy playing the game we call soccer (and everyone else calls futbol), but it’s definitely not part of our “hegemonic sports culture.” According to political scientist Andrei Markovits, we save our love for the “Big Three and One-Half”: baseball, football (our kind), basketball, and ice hockey.

Since Jeffrey Goldberg used it on his Atlantic blog and Michael Chabon picked it up in The New York Times, the word of the week is seichel, defined by Goldberg as connoting “wisdom, ... ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance.” A person with seichel “looks for a clever way out of problems,” “understands that the most direct way — blunt force, for instance — often represents the least elegant solution, and (most important) can foresee consequences of his actions.”

Both Goldberg and Chabon regard last week’s attack on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara as totally lacking in seichel.

“Nine color pages of Renoir paintings followed by a picture of a roller-skating horse . . . Just think, nine pages of Renoirs! But that roller-skating horse comes along, and the final impression is that both Renoir and the horse were talented.” Thus did literary critic Dwight MacDonald ridicule

Life magazine’s “attempts at popular education” in his 1960 essay, “Masscult & Midcult.” His point was that we should deplore any medium that cannot properly order its messages.

How tame MacDonald’s juxtaposition seems today, when anyone with a TV remote can click from an angry preacher denouncing moral decadence to “Telephone,” the latest video from Lady Gaga, in which she plays a freaky sexpot inmate in a creepy women’s prison who escapes to join Beyoncé in a diner, where they gleefully poison all the customers. Long accustomed to such indigestible contrasts, we Americans just shrug and keep on surfing.

Against the backdrop of in-your-face lobbying by the banking and financial industries, scant attention is being paid this week to the Motion Picture Association of America’s announcement that its new chief lobbyist will be the former Democratic senator from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey.

Kerrey is the second person to step into the unfillable shoes of Jack Valenti, the high-flying MPAA head whose circle of intimates included everyone of note in both the nation’s capital and its dream factory. Valenti’s immediate successor, Dan Glickman, cut a less colorful figure, in part because he’s a less colorful guy, but also because during his tenure (he resigned in January) the MPAA was deliberately muting its presence in Washington.

In 2007, when Dinesh D’Souza fingered Oliver Stone as a member of “the Hollywood Left,” it was only the latest in a half-century of conservative attacks on the pinko bias of the American film industry. That bias was once quite real, and if you want a lucid, fair-minded account of its history, read Ronald and Allis Radosh’s superb Red Star Over Hollywood.

But for many years now, the dominant bias in Hollywood has not been leftism but gleeful amorality. Case in point: the big news at the Cannes Film Festival last week was the premier of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, directed by Stone and touted as a timely update of Wall Street, the director’s 1987 film ostensibly attacking socially irresponsible corporate raiders.

My first glimpse of the ineptitude of current US public diplomacy was a Fourth of July party thrown by the American Embassy in Berlin in 2003. The setting was a lovely garden, but America’s many culinary traditions were represented by Burger King, KFC, and Pepsi; and her rich cultural heritage was summed up in a medley of Motown hits performed by a military band in a style best described as latter-day minstrel.

Now jaded, I ponder the pathetic US pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai, and shrug. This is how my country presents itself these days, and when the world reacts with bewilderment and scorn, the Obama administration seems no more perturbed than its predecessor.

At Boston College I teach a senior seminar called “Americans, Ugly and Beautiful,” and last week we had a visitor: Sean Morrow, an Army major still on active duty and getting a master’s degree in English; he was deployed twice in Iraq, one during the invasion and the other during the surge.

The topic was counterinsurgency, and the readings included “Inside the Surge,” a first-person account written by Army Lt. Col. Jim Crider, which was published in June 2009 by the Center for a New American Security.

It was a good class—unlike most discussions of the Iraq war in academia, it was neither a barrage of blue-state invective, nor a firefight between cliché-spouting undergraduates. A couple of students admitted to having never met an active-duty soldier, much less an Iraq vet; one remarked that he would never consider serving in the military but was glad others did. But the students (and their professor) were riveted by Maj. Morrow’s experiences, which, needless to say, did not fit into any ideologically constructed box.

It’s been a long time since Hollywood worked with Washington to make films supportive of U.S. government policy. This happened during both world wars, but it ended with HUAC and Vietnam. And today, while some action films are still made with Defense Department help, the vast majority rely on stock villains—ruthless tycoons, corrupt politicians, power-mad generals—that would hardly pass muster with the Pentagon’s Office of Public Affairs.

Conservatives deplore this conspiratorial tendency, and so do I, especially when pondering the impression it makes overseas. But would it be better to have Hollywood devote its vast resources and talents to churning out propaganda useful to the regime? For a taste of what this might look like, consider the current state of action films in Turkey.

Memo to the new members of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (should they ever be confirmed):

Last week there was an uprising in Kyrgyzstan, which took most Western governments by surprise. To judge by the initial news reports, the ouster of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev took most of the media by surprise, too. Most of the American media focused on the Manas air base near Bishkek, which is crucial to the war in Afghanistan. Now that the interim president, former diplomat Roza Otunbayeva, appears willing to permit the base, the story has faded from view.

But let’s say an English-speaking person wants to know more. Placing myself in that position, I went online to see what was out there. What did I find?

In my March 22 post, I provided some background to On the Road in America, the U.S.-made TV series now airing on the popular Arab satellite channel MBC 1. I also promised to review the series as soon as I could get a copy. Here is that review:

Joseph Assi is a 22-year-old Palestinian Christian who grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon. He’s also a young man on a quest. He joined the cast of On the Road because he wanted to tell the world about the plight of his people. While touring the southern United States with three other young Arab visitors, he raises the topic with everyone he meets. But one of Joseph’s more endearing traits is that he also listens. And while his commitment doesn’t change as his journey progresses, his understanding deepens.

In recent years Turkey has been seeking to become a key player in Middle Eastern geopolitics. From an American perspective, one surprising aspect of that bid is the spread of Turkish soft power throughout the region—via TV soap operas.

When Turkish TV was deregulated in the 1980s, the easiest way to fill airtime was with cheap series from the United States and telenovelas from Latin America. By the mid-1990s, though, Turkish companies were beginning to woo viewers with programs more attuned to their specific concerns.

Uppermost in viewers’ minds was the challenge of reconciling a more modern, Western lifestyle with resurgent Islam. So the Turkish TV industry created a slew of melodramas by writers and producers who, in the words of film director Ezel Akay, “knew how to hold the guts of the audience.”

If you have access to MBC-1, the premier entertainment channel in the 22-nation Arab market, tune in this Thursday and Friday for the first and second episodes of Ala al Tariq fi Amrika (On the Road in America).

Now starting its second season, On the Road in America is a U.S.-made reality show that follows a group of young Arab visitors on a road trip across the southern United States, stopping in red and blue territory on the way and ending up in Washington, D.C. It is the creation of Layalina Productions, a Washington-based nonprofit that makes Arabic-language programs with the old-fashioned aim of increasing international understanding.

With heavy March rains seeping into their basements, millions of East Coast homeowners will soon be facing an infestation of black mold. Some will take action before the growth becomes toxic; others will avoid the whole problem, rationalizing that there is no good way to keep a basement from smelling musty.

But what about the mustiness emanating from Washington? Is something toxic growing there that even vigilant Americans avoid thinking about? Yes, and while some associate it with the name Blackwater, the rot I have in mind—maximum outsourcing with minimum oversight—is far more pervasive than one company.

On Monday, The New York Times broke yet another story about unofficial war-making by a private military contractor. This time, it’s an off-the-books intel-gathering operation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, run by a retired Air Force officer named Michael Furlong. Predictably, the story has provoked both blue-state huffing about covert ops being so evil they require full transparency, and red-state puffing about the war on terror being so urgent it justifies abandoning the chain of command.