I’VE spent most of my career covering Middle East politics. I always thought it was its own unique field. But, in the last few weeks, I’ve felt myself to be at a real advantage trying to explain American politics. You see, it turns out that all those years covering Sunnis and Shiites, Israelis and Palestinians, tribal conflicts and “Parties of God” have been the best preparation for covering today’s Washington, D.C., and particularly the Tea Party. Seriously, you’d get a much better feel for Washington politics today by reading “Lawrence of Arabia” than the Federalist Papers. This is not good news.

Let me start by recalling a column I recently wrote from Kansas that noted the parallel between monocultures and polycultures in nature and politics. It began with the scientist Wes Jackson, the president of The Land Institute, explaining that the prairie was a diverse wilderness, with a complex ecosystem that naturally supported all kinds of wildlife, until European settlers plowed it up and covered it with single-species crop farms, mostly wheat, corn or soybeans. Today, noted Jackson, we now use high-density fossil fuels — in the form of gasoline-powered tractors, pesticides and fertilizers — to sustain these single-species, annual monoculture crops, which are much more susceptible to disease and are exhausting the nutrient-rich topsoil that is the source of all prairie life. During the Dust Bowl years of the ’30s, Jackson reminded, the monoculture crops died but the polyculture prairie, with its diverse ecosystem, survived.  [Link]