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The New
Rules of the Game
![]() I
don’t read much fiction, so I was disinclined to read the
manuscript of a new novel that arrived in the mail a few months ago.
I’d never heard of the author. But
the story was set in my home town, Ypsilanti, Michigan, and I gave
it a try, expecting to be bored after a chapter or two.
![]() I
found myself still reading it in the wee hours. It was one of the
most emotionally grueling stories I’d ever read. But as soon as I
woke up in the morning I had to finish it. The author asked for my
endorsement; after reading it, I wanted to give copies to all my
friends. It was that powerful.
![]() The
book, Blind Baseball: A Father’s War, has now been
published by AuthorHouse in Bloomington, Indiana (www.authorhouse.com).
It’s not about baseball; it’s about a divorce, and much more.
The title is an odd but apt metaphor explained late in the book. The
author, Allen Green, writes with such passion it’s tempting to
believe the tale is autobiographical, but it isn’t.
![]() The
story’s hero, Barry Ballinger, has, to say the least, a troubled
marriage. His wife, Sal, serves him with divorce papers, empties
their bank account, and spitefully runs up huge debts in his name.
She also means to take custody of their six children. And that’s
just the beginning of her campaign to ruin, humiliate, and utterly
destroy him.
![]() Barry
goes to a lawyer, who tells him that under Michigan’s no-fault
divorce law his chances of getting custody of the children are
almost nil. Originally intended to level the playing field and make
the dissolution of marriage as painless as possible, the law
actually has the opposite effect: It gives women like Sal, who know
how to play the angles, huge legal advantages. It also serves the
interests of predatory men, like the sponging lovers Sal brings into
the home once Barry has been expelled. The horror is that Barry is
punished for trying to be a responsible father.
![]() Sal
is none too bright, but she has a shrewd instinct for power. With
the aid of her lawyer — a “barracuda at law,” in Barry’s
phrase — she turns all the resources of the state against Barry.
Through her machinations and false accusations, he loses his
children, his property, his livelihood, his reputation, and very
nearly his sanity. At one point he actually finds himself committed
to a mental institution. He seems to be baffled at every turn. For a
while his situation seems hopeless.
![[Breaker quote: The state and the family]](http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/2004breakers/040826.gif)  Blind
Baseball is to domestic law what 1984 is to
politics. It vividly shows how bureaucratic “social services”
can be perverted into tools of raw power over the unsuspecting
individual. At first Barry naively assumes the basic fairness of the
system; he is quickly disabused by the successive hammer-blows of
Sal’s cunning malice.
![]() What
makes this more than a mere divorce novel is Green’s grasp of the
systematic nature of the forces Barry faces. Slowly he comes to
realize that he’s up against something more than a flaw in the
system: This is just how the system is designed to work.
![]() But
unlike Orwell’s hapless hero, Winston Smith, Barry is no passive
victim. As he comprehends that the real enemy is much bigger than
Sal, and as Sal herself overplays her hand, he manages to achieve a
limited victory — though only after the turmoil has caused him and
his kids enormous stress and pain.
![]() Many
fathers can attest that Barry’s plight is neither unique nor
exaggerated. The laws, institutions, and state agents that nearly
crush him are real, and this is how they operate in countless cases
every day. Some fathers, despairing of justice under the law, kidnap
their own children and disappear.
![]() The
book isn’t entirely bleak. Barry receives encouragement and wisdom
from his old mentor, Art Smith, who explains that the state is
dedicated to destroying families. The root of Barry’s crisis is
the materialist philosophy that shapes the laws, creating an
unnatural balance of power. Once he understands this, Barry is able
to pull himself together and salvage his and his children’s lives.
And Sal’s malignity finally carries its own punishment.
![]() Blind
Baseball is in the end a comment not only on marriage and
divorce, but on the irrationality of modern law itself. Barry’s
bitter wit adds both wry amusement and sharp insight to a wrenching
drama of the soul against the state.
Joseph Sobran
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