Highest common denominator: An interview with John
Derbyshire

By Bernard Chapin
web posted May 19, 2003

 John Derbyshire is a Contributing Editor at the National Review
 (NR) and he has produced a great many essays for the
 magazine in his time there. He can be found online as well at
 www.nationalreview.com where he has regular features and a
 monthly diary blog.

These are excited times for him as he has just released a brand
new book, Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann & the Greatest
Unsolved Problem in Mathematics. In this book he reportedly
does the impossible by making higher level mathematics
interesting to the layman. Such an achievement is certainly far
beyond the skills of the average technical writer.

Derbyshire has seemingly endless interests. His is a fertile mind
and he has been quite prolific. He arranged, selected and penned
an introduction for a compendium of poems called 36 Great
American Poems. He also is a novelist. One of his novels, Seeing
Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, possesses perhaps the perfect
conservative title. Another novel, Fire from the Sun, is also
available and was released in 2001.

John Derbyshire is a writer who never crosses the line into
becoming a polemicist. His words are stated in a genial voice of
reason. The one quality that sets him apart from his peers is his
overwhelming sincerity. It comes through in just about everything
that he publishes. Regardless of the topic and whether one
agrees or disagrees with him, the reader becomes uniquely
aware that this is a man expressing a genuinely honest opinion.
There's no spin in the output of John Derbyshire.

He certainly does not suffer from taking himself too seriously. As
he noted on his website regarding his letters to the editor "I must
have published hundreds of specimens of this low and
embarrassing genre." So let us now hear from this Renaissance
man in another enterstageright.com exclusive interview.

BC: Derbyshire, you are Contributing Editor at National Review
(NR), and perhaps a good question to start with is how do you
feel about the current intraconservative battle between the neo-
conservatives and the paleo-conservatives? Do you side with
NR's David Frum on this issue? How much can this squabble
affect the strength of the conservative movement?

JD: I must say, with no prejudice to David, I have a
temperamental distaste for that sort of thing. I spent my student
days trying to associate with Trotskyists. I say "trying" because I
could never keep up with their petty feuds, their constant splitting
and re-forming, what I call the "pond life" aspect of political
activity. No sooner would a group attain some kind of coherence
than a minority faction in the group would decide that the group's
ideology was insufficiently pure, and would split off to start a
group of their own. I found myself thinking that if this is politics, I
would rather have nothing to do with it. Of course that is not
mainstream politics, it is only fringe politics - Britain never did get
a Trotskyist prime minister. It left me, though, with a powerful
aversion to factionalism of all kinds.

Now of course David has a point that needed making. There
actually are some people out there on the fringes of conservatism
whose personal obsessions have led them into positions that, I
agree, can be fairly described as un-, or even anti-patriotic. Anti-
semitism is also a constant temptation for conservatives of a
certain kind, not necessarily the unpatriotic kind. As a romantic
lover of America and a strong philosemite, I don't want to share
the conservative movement with anti-patriots or anti-semites.
And I quite see the logic of Bill Buckley's argument, which he
has recently made the basis of a fascinating novel, that what he
calls "exercises in exclusion" are from time to time necessary in
order to maintain the integrity and effectiveness of the
conservative movement, or any other movement. Movements
have to be policed; and policing is bound to be, to some degree,
unpleasant and unsightly work.

Politics is, always has been, and always will be infested with
cranks and monomaniacs of various kinds. You can never
entirely get rid of them, but those you can't get rid of, you need
to keep in the shadows, and not let the broad public get the
impression that they speak for the movement. That is the
policing, the "exercises in exclusion," that Bill Buckley talks
about.

There is a difference, however, between a policeman and a
witch-hunter. Conservatism is not such a great force in American
life that we can afford to exclude willy-nilly large groups of
honest, patriotic conservatives whom we disagree with about
some issue or other. For example: I read both the Wall Street
Journal Op-Ed page, which favors open immigration, and also
Peter Brimelow's excellent VDARE website, which is strongly
immigration-restrictionist. I think they are both important
conservative voices, though personally I agree with the second
much more than the first. I should hate to see either become the
subject of an "exercise in exclusion."

I think ultimately it's a question of tone and attitude. One thing I
have always loved about NR is that it is a good-natured
magazine. I have seen several twists and turns in the policy line at
NR since I started reading it in the late 1970s, but it has always
kept that agreeable, tolerant, gentlemanly tone, and as long as it
keeps it, I shall be an NR reader (and, I hope, contributor). The
tone comes, of course, from the personality of the founder, Bill
Buckley, who is one of the most good-natured men I have ever
met - a true American gentleman.

From that point of view, David's piece seems to me to be on the
very edge, though I think not over it. I mean, it is just within the
boundaries of what I want to read in NR, speaking as a reader
of a quarter century's standing who strongly identifies with the
NR ethos. And I should not want to read too many pieces of
that kind - one every five years or so would be just about right, I
think.

As I began by saying, I have a temperamental distaste for that
sort of thing - for seeing the policeman swing his nightstick. I
suppose it has to be swung now and then, though; and David,
whom I admire as a talented and imaginative writer, is a good
person to swing it.

BC: I guess it's not "your father's NR" anymore. There have
been accusations from some that the quality of National Review
has changed in recent years. Do you think that the magazine has
recently made a shift to the right or the left on the political
spectrum? How would you describe NR's weltanschauung
(rightist-libertarian, conservative, new school conservative, etc)?
It seems to be that it clearly supports diverse views though, as
Mark Helprin's recent piece criticizing the war suggests.

JD: I had better preface what I say with the following disclaimer:
I am not a NR staffer, only a "contributing editor," paid by the
piece. I therefore do not speak for NR in any official way, and
what I say here, I say as a long-time reader and lover of NR, but
still as an outsider.

Any magazine that has been around for 48 years must face the
problem that a lot of its most dedicated and loyal readership is
rather old. The magazine needs to keep the loyalty of these
readers for reasons both moral and financial; yet it must also be
constantly trying to get new readers - the younger the better, so
that they too will get the NR habit and join the long-term core
readership.

In America today this is a difficult balancing act, because very
fundamental shifts of outlook have occurred in the past 48 years,
among conservatives as much as - perhaps even more than -
elsewhere. I frequently meet college students who tell me they
are conservative, who have all the attributes of what seems to me
a broadly conservative outlook on life and society, who want to
read conservative publications... yet who have a deep dislike of
many of the topics - not just the point of view, the actual topics -
that interest older readers.

This shows up most especially in the area of race, and the
penumbra of issues - immigration, for instance, or crime-fighting
- that are associated with it. The kind of thoughtful and intelligent
young people that NR would like to have as readers understand
that there are problems and absurdities connected with race in
our public life, and are happy to hear arguments pro and con
about racial profiling, affirmative action, and so on. They laugh
with us when we lampoon the more outrageous kind of black
race hustler - a Sharpton, a Farrakhan, a Johnny Cochran. They
are, however, determined to make the multiracial society work,
they believe it can be made to work in spite of the hustlers and
liberal guilt-mongers, and they are unwilling to read, say, or think
anything that could be construed as unkind towards people of
other races. The pessimism and cynicism on this topic that you
rather commonly find among conservatives - including NR
readers - born in 1930, or even 1950, are profoundly
unappetizing to these younger conservatives.

The editors of the magazine have to square this circle, and it ain't
easy. One simple way to do it is to rule certain topics out of
bounds. This is unsatisfactory in all sorts of ways, and opens the
magazine up to accusations of blandness, or of having moved
away from "true" conservatism (there are as many opinions about
what that means as there are conservatives!) but I think it can't
be avoided. After all, no magazine can talk about everything, and
there are plenty of other outlets for views you won't find in NR.
Given the constraints I have just sketched out, I must say I think
the range of views in NR is surprisingly broad, and the balance
very well managed.

BC: You write a great many articles for NR and several other
publications but you also just finished a book, Prime Obsession:
Bernhard Riemann & the Greatest Unsolved Problem in
Mathematics. Is it difficult to market a book about mathematics
to the population in general? Also, how's the book doing?

JD: Yes, very difficult! And I really have no idea how the book is
doing. You don't really get a feel for how a book is doing until
it's been on the market for several months. My Amazon sales
rankings are surprisingly good; but that is a very volatile measure.
From the point of view of a book's being successful, it is
probably better to hang around in the 2,000-5,000 range of
Amazon rankings for a couple of years, than to spend a few
weeks in the low hundreds.

I must add here, though, a work of thanks - of deep gratitude, in
fact - to the apparently (I am going here on the basis of e-mails
received and people met at book-signing events) large number of
NR and NRO readers who have bought my book not because
they are keen on math but just because they like my columns and
postings. God bless those people. I hope they will all get
something out of my book; and I hope that some large minority
of them will be turned on to math by reading it, to their own
surprise!

BC: I seem to recall that another book about this specialized
topic came out at exactly the same time. For the readers who
might not be familiar with the story, how did the revelation that
another author was writing about the same subject matter affect
your production of the work?

JD: Two other books! One is Kenneth Sabbagh's The Riemann
Hypothesis, the other Marcus du Sautoy's The Music of the
Primes. We knew about du Sautoy's book early on. My literary
agent, when he is trying to place a book proposal, tackles the
publishing industry from the top down, so Harper Collins was
one of the first publishers he tried, in summer of 2000. They
politely told us they had already signed up du Sautoy and gave
us the title - from which I could pretty much tell what the book
was about, and could even guess what approach the author was
taking. Sabbagh's book I heard about later and didn't know
much about, and in fact still haven't read.

The main effect of knowing about these other books - especially
du Sautoy's, which had a lead of over a year on us (Prime
Obsession did not get placed with Joseph Henry Press until the
fall of 2001) - was to make my book a crash project. It started
out as a 10-page proposal, which I had pretty much forgotten
about by the time we placed the book, over a year later. So I
had to write a 400-page book about an advanced mathematical
topic, in a way that would appeal to general readers, in 8 months
from a standing start, while holding on to my day job as an
opinion journalist. I feel immensely pleased with myself that I
managed to accomplish this. It was tough. The book is
unsatisfactory in some ways because of being written under
pressure like that, but on the whole I am satisfied with it.

BC: Many may not be aware that you are originally from
England. I have read much about the current state of Albion. The
essayist Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) has addressed
the decline of law and order within the nation. With small
children at home, are you now glad more than ever to be in
America? What are your feelings about England today?

JD: I have always felt that I was not really meant to be English,
that some sort of mistake was made. I am not in tune with any of
the characteristically English obsessions. I can't stand soccer or
cricket, like my beer chilled, am unsentimental about animals,
have no interest in the doings of royalty, and get hay fever at the
mere sight of a thatched cottage. Consequently, I have spent
very little of my adult life in England, and am probably not a
good person to go to for opinions about the place.

The broad difference between traditional-English and traditional-
American society was that the first depended much more on
authority than the second. Americans are, as de Tocqueville and
Dickens and everyone else noticed, an amazingly self-reliant
people. The general collapse of authority, and of respect for
authority, that occurred all over the western world from the
1960s on, therefore caused much more damage in England than
here. The degradation and nihilism that Dalrymple writes about
are very real and widespread, though one must always
remember that the man works in a prison.

There are things about contemporary English life that I like,
though; mostly things that are present because the old English
ideals of duty, rank, service, decency, patriotism and mutual
obligation have not yet been altogether killed off - though not for
want of trying on the part of the intellectual elites. The BBC, for
example, though heavily infiltrated by the fascist Left, still has
pockets of the old gentility (consult your dictionary, please) in
Radio 3 and Radio 4. The old English skepticism towards grand
intellectual schemes, the faith in common sense and practicality,
the tolerance for human oddity, the love of irony and clever
rhetorical tropes, can still be found in definitely un-American
quantities. And the English have absolutely the best crosswords.

So far as child-raising is concerned, the main difference between
the two countries is in the number of single-sex schools - ones, I
mean, that are accessible to people of middle income - that are
present in England. I think mixed-sex schooling is a bad idea, for
both social and academic reasons. On the other hand, American
kids have better manners than their English coevals (as, come to
think of it, do American adults), so presumably we are doing
something right here.

BC: As far as England's politics go, are the Tories finished? Can
this party of Thatcher rise again? If not, is there any chance for a
new conservative party to rise in England and positively influence
the country and put it in the right direction?

JD: Of course the Tories are not finished. They are in the
doldrums, and have not found an effective way to address the
electorate, but that happens to political parties from time to time
- it happened to the Labour Party in a big way in the 1980s.
Political parties only wither and die when great demographic or
constitutional upheavals take place, as with the decline of the
Liberal Party in the early 20th century. Much more often they
rise to the occasion, changing themselves to appeal successfully
to a changed electorate.

Somehow or other the Tories will find a new synthesis, one that
incorporates traditional Tory values - fiscal restraint, wariness of
major constitutional rearrangements, aversion to schemes of
social engineering and moralistic Nanny State prohibitions, strong
attachment to national sovereignty, and so on. (I would add: a
respect for local and municipal arrangements over centralized
government - the "principle of subsidiarity" - though I do
acknowledge that the greatest enemy of that particular principle
in late-20th-century England, pre-Blair, was Margaret Thatcher.)
To bring this new synthesis about, two things will be required: (1)
imaginative and authoritative party leadership, and (2) the
opening up of serious cracks in the Blair project. The second is
already happening; the first, unfortunately, is in the lap of the
Gods.

BC: You are certainly a true Renaissance man. Others might not
know of your expertise regarding China. Is China slowly but
surely becoming a freer and better place in which to live? I was
surprised to hear how many automobiles the Chinese are
importing at present. Will the free market's success delegitimize
the totalitarian structure of the government? Might we see a
political implosion like with the Soviet Union?

JD: The only important question about China is what I call the
"midwife" one. Can a secretive, authoritarian, corrupt, self-
serving party with a disgraceful past serve as the midwife for a
genuinely liberal-constitutional order? Most of my Chinese
friends believe it can, and Fareed Zakaria, whose new book I
have just been reading, agrees. "Sure," these optimists say, "the
communists are awful. China is still a poor and backward
country, though. It needs an authoritarian dictatorship to get it
through the transition to a more modern kind of society, just as
Taiwan and South Korea did. Once they are over that hump,
democracy will emerge. Don't worry about the communists. In
10 or 15 years they'll be gone."

There is some merit in that argument. For example, one
imperative for China right now is to dismantle the old "state-
owned industries," the Soviet-style industrial behemoths
producing goods nobody wants to buy. This would be
impossible under an electoral democracy, at any rate without
serious social disorder. There are just too many people
dependent on those industries. A reform like that has to be
pushed through by major force - though, as a matter of fact, the
communists have not yet summoned up the guts to do it!

On the other hand, China is not Taiwan or South Korea. It is a
much bigger country, with much greater disparities between large
regions where things are pretty good, and large regions where
things are terrible. It is also an empire, with Chinese troops and
secret police garrisoning vast areas - half the territory of the
"People's Republic"! - that are not really Chinese, and whose
base populations simmer with religious and ethnic resentments,
and with the memories of horrible atrocities against them and
their ways of life in the recent past.

Worst and most dismaying of all, China is a country suffused
with the most primitive, brutish and atavistic kind of chauvinism -
a poisonous mix of resentment against past wrongs both real and
imagined, an angry racism, and a belligerent assertion of China's
right to do anything she damn well feels like doing, and can get
away with.

Economics isn't everything. Mentality counts for something. The
current national mentality of China - carefully cultivated by the
Communists, of course, as a prop for their own legitimacy, but
now out of their control like Frankenstein's monster - hovers on
the edge of psychopathology, and seems to get worse with each
rising generation. On some important issues, including relations
with the U.S.A., the Chinese communist leadership is probably
more liberal than the Chinese people, certainly than the young
urban intellectuals I myself have had angry shouting matches
with.

I got my education as a China-watcher from the old China hands
of Hong Kong, who were uniformly pessimistic. Their entire
outlook could be summed up as: "Never, never, never be
optimistic about China. China will always break your heart." I
had not fully internalized that outlook when 1989 came along,
and I was optimistic that the student movement might effect real
political change. It didn't, of course, and I resolved that I would
never again be caught out being optimistic about China.

With that attitude, I have been resisting the "midwife" argument. I
wouldn't rule it out, though, and it is a possible future for China.
Yes, life in China is much freer and better now that 20, or even
10 years ago. Yes, China might follow the path of Taiwan, South
Korea, Singapore. I would rate the probability at no better than
20 percent, though. Other, much uglier futures - some of them
ugly only for the Chinese themselves, some ugly for the whole
world - are, in my opinion, more probable. So count me a China
pessimist.

A hundred years ago Sun Yat-sen, who understood his
countrymen very well indeed, identified three areas in which the
Chinese needed to change to a modern mentality: economics,
politics, and the National Question. The first change has been
pretty well accomplished, and the second could indeed follow,
on the "midwife" principle. The third change, however, has not
taken place. If anything, the Chinese have gone backward in the
ability to see themselves as a nation in a world of nation-states.
Far from having escaped from the imperial-civilizational
mentality, they are sunk in it deeper than ever.

The contradictions inherent in the National Question could
destroy all China's progress. They could, in fact, destroy the
world. The really bad news is that there is probably nothing at all
we can do about this, except to keep yelling in their ears. Events
in China have never followed any foreigner's script, and when
foreigners have tried to push China in any particular direction,
China has generally veered off at right angles, like a gyroscope.

BC: You write quite often for The New Criterion which is one of
the finest publications in the world (in the opinion of this writer)
but what is it about the journal that causes it to be so highly
esteemed? I just read that Partisan Review was folding up for
good and one authority said it did so because it lost its sense of
purpose. What is The New Criterion's sense of purpose?

JD: It is to stand against the current new-Left degradation of
academic and cultural life in the way that Partisan Review stood
against the old-Left conformism of the intelligentsia in the 1940s
and 1950s. To quote from their editorial manifesto in the very
first issue of TNC, the founders aimed to appeal to "anyone
capable of recalling a time when criticism was more strictly
concerned to distinguish achievement from failure, to identify and
uphold a standard of quality, and to speak plainly and vigorously
about the problems that beset the life of the arts and the life of
the mind in our society."

I believe they have been true to that manifesto, and I think that
the esteem you spoke of issues from the magazine's integrity. It
even looks the same as it did in 1982. Now that is conservative!
You know where you are with TNC. They go everywhere that
an intelligent and well-educated person might want to go: art,
music, drama, poetry, politics, even science - they actually
reviewed Prime Obsession! (Not, I hope and believe, merely as
a friendly courtesy to a contributor.) And wherever they go they
bring with them the same sensibility: witty without being frivolous,
thoughtful without being densely intellectual, opinionated without
being hectoring, conservative in the true sense of seeking to
conserve eternal high-cultural values in an easily-distracted age.

BC: If someone runs across this interview and they are just
beginning to explore conservatism, what publications would you
recommend their reading? I think several months back you
mentioned that you are a devotee of The Public Interest but what
else? How about particular books? A person only has so much
free time in a week or month, so what would you define as
essential reading?

JD: Oh, dear. I am afraid that here you bump up against my
Anglican aversion to theorizing, theology and system-building. In
that respect I am very English, I suppose. I really have almost no
interest in "conservatism" as a body of theory. Conservatism to
me is a bit like atheism - defined by what it does not believe.
Conservatism is anti-ideology.

Since you have raised the name of Theodore Dalrymple and
mentioned The New Criterion, here is the first, writing in the
second (May 2003 issue, p.35): "Anti-communism was not an
ideology - it was merely an anti-ideology - but it drew a great
deal of strength from the self-evidently formidable nature of the
foe, and thus came to appear almost an ideology in itself. But the
anti-ideologist now has to fight on a hundred fronts at once; it is
more like a guerilla than a conventional war. And since, almost
by definition, the anti-ideologist is not as obsessed with any given
subject as his many opponents are, who each derive the meaning
of their lives from their ideologised grievances, he is at a
permanent disadvantage. In the absence of a strong communist
enemy, ideology makes inroads in our society as easily as a hot
knife through butter."

I like that very much. Conservatism is not an ideology: it is a war
on ideology, a never-ending war - a rearguard action, I think in
my darker moments.

My advice to your hypothetical browser "just beginning to
explore conservatism" would therefore go somewhat as follows.
Give all the main conservative-journalism outlets a fair try, and
subscribe to those that appeal to you the most. The general-
interest ones are: National Review, The American Spectator,
Human Events, The Weekly Standard, the London Spectator,
The New Criterion, and the editorial pages of the Wall Street
Journal, Washington Times, New York Sun, and London Daily
Telegraph. If you think you are inclined in a "paleo" direction, try
The American Conservative and Chronicles, which are both very
well and professionally produced. If you have some particular
interest, the articles and advertisements in the general-purpose
magazines will soon alert you to a specialist publication you might
want to look at - First Things or Crisis, for example, if you are a
religious conservative, or Policy Review or The Public Interest if
you are more of a policy wonk, Claremont Review for literary
criticism, and so on. Now I look back over this paragraph, I am
struck by the richness and quality of conservative publications
that are available. Being a thoughtful conservative, even an
intellectual conservative, is not, after all, such a lonely business!

If you are going to hobnob with conservative intellectuals, get a
copy of George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual
Movement in America Since 1945 for reference, so when the
names of the Church Fathers come up you will know who they
are and what they stood for. For a conservative viewpoint on
U.S. history, check out Rick Brookhiser's numerous and
beautifully-written books. For a world-wide view, try Paul
Johnson, especially his History of Christianity, History of the
Jews, Modern Times and Birth of the Modern. Read the book
reviews in the conservative magazines, and try current writers
you like the sound of.

BC: I know I'm a broken record because in all of these
interviews I mention the topic of the culture war, but in your
opinion, can conservatives still win the war for culture? What is it
that we can do to advance our cause?

JD: In the sense that the grossest and most degrading
manifestations of popular culture will continue to press
themselves on our, and our children's, attention - that avoiding
those manifestations will continue to demand constant, daily
efforts of will - no, I don't think we can win the war for culture. I
think that war is lost for good. Popular democracy has reached
its complete fulfillment in post-industrial society.

BOSWELL. "I think, Sir, you once said to me, that not to drink
wine was a great deduction from life."
JOHNSON. "It is a diminution of pleasure, to be sure; but I do
not say a diminution of happiness. There is more happiness in
being rational."
BOSWELL. "But if we could have pleasure always, should not
we be happy? The greatest part of men would compound for
pleasure."
JOHNSON. "Supposing we could have pleasure always, an
intellectual man would not compound for it. The greatest part of
men would compound, because the greatest part of men are
gross."

Yes: "the greatest part of men are gross," no less now than in
1778. Probably no more, either; but nowadays they have the
vote, and money to spend. They have shucked off all notions of
rank or authority, of deference or respectability, of hierarchy or
standards in taste, and they believe that everyone's pleasure is as
good as everyone else's. That's the world we live in, for better or
worse - in some ways, let's be honest, much for the better - and
it's not easy to imagine us going back.

All we - we conservatives - can do is to hold on to the truth, to
standards, to intellectual discipline. Speak the truth!

* No, people in past times were not less intelligent than
ourselves.

* Yes, some productions of the human imagination are superior
to others, for reasons to do with eternal values.

* No, it is not the case that white people are inherently wicked
(though some are) and un-white people inherently virtuous
(though some are).

* Yes, words have meanings, and refer to real things in a real
world.

* No, money is not the root of all evil; but too much obsessing
about it will deaden you to things of the spirit.

* Yes, human nature exists. It contains both good and evil,
always has, and always will.

* No, peace is not always preferable to war, not even to
aggressive war.

* Yes, this is a commercial republic, and except in times of grave
national danger, government work, however worthy, must take
second place to commerce.

* No, gay is not just as good as straight, the ancient Egyptians
did not have black skin, a woman needs a man much, much
more than a fish needs a bicycle, rhyme and meter (to say
nothing of sense) are not obsolete features in English
versification, and self-love is not the greatest love of all, but the
least.

* It is highly unlikely that any one of us is a uniquely talented
individual with a precious gift to offer the world. It is vastly more
probable that we are mere atoms in the mass of humanity, who
must find fulfillment in a lifetime of performing humdrum tasks on
behalf of our family, neighbors, and fellow-citizens, while we
each explore our individuality in small rewarding hobbies and
private devotions.

I don't think conservatism is necessarily gloomy, and in fact the
conservatives I hang out with are, most of them, happy and witty
people who enjoy life. (NR editorial conferences are a laugh
riot.) However, we conservatives are people of the Cold Eye,
which sees things as they are. Wishful thinking is the province of
the Left, and the end result of it, always and ever, is the one spelt
out by conservatism's greatest poet:
 
.... after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins,
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his
sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, 
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter
return!
 
Bernard Chapin is a school psychologist and adjunct faculty
member in Chicago. He can be reached at emeritus@flash.net.

Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com