When I was 41, I met a birthday buddy. He was born exactly three years before I, and we were so alike it seemed a point for astrology. Until I got to know him better. There were similarities, sure, and those are what you always notice at first. We’ve been friends long enough now that we appreciate how thorough our dissimilarities are.

But we’re still friends. We talk. We each get the vicarious benefit of the other’s experiences. Through him I can imagine what it would feel like to be a very bright tending-to-pudgy boy, now old and accoutered. I receive flashes of how it would have been to acquire triplet brothers, to grow up around chickens, to be the son of Greek immigrants. His folks came from Sparta.

Mine were first generation Americans. The children of Jews from Russia and Poland. I was raised around appreciation for the brave hard-working immigrant, and I heard some moans about how much that vigor and ambition is diluted even in one generation, but my friend Charley was closer to it. His parents embarrassed him with their accents. He and his brothers were the first step in dilution (assimilation?). And he still has cousins in the old country.

A short time after I met him, Charley took a trip to Greece. He rented a car and drove it to Sparta, and he stayed awhile with his family there. His report about that visit struck me.

“They were nice folks, Mar,” he said after his trip. “Very sweet and hospitable. They seemed to like meeting me. But what can I say?” and he paused, for effect or maybe for water. “They seemed stupid to me. Simple. It was like all the brains in the family left the country.”

Whoa. Lightbulb. What he said made sense. It was like when Danny was incorrectly diagnosed with ADD – I read up on the disorder and saw that it was diagnosed twice as often here as in other developed countries, and I thought sure, maybe sometimes it’s misdiagnosed here, but also maybe it takes a certain amount of impulsivity to cross an ocean, and then to cross a continent, and maybe ADD is a form of impulsivity gone too far, you know? So I was already on the path of seeing immigration as an obvious and fast form of selection.

It’s over a decade and a half later and nothing has overthrown this idea. I just returned from a quick tour of the holy land. I visited Greece, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Italy – all countries famous for their civilizations. And I saw repeated evidence that the current residents are not comporting themselves consistently with any form of enlightened existence. Glories passed and mediocre presence. Except for Israel. Which continues to be a nation of immigrants. Hmmm.