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The New Rules of the Game-Joe Sobran

Thread ID: 14976 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2004-09-13

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londo [OP]

2004-09-13 01:41 | User Profile

August 26, 2004

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 ([url]www.authorhouse.com[/url]). 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.

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.

[url=http://www.sobran.com/columns/index.shtml] Read the rest here [/url]

arkady

2004-09-13 14:03 | User Profile

Unfortunately, Sobran thinks that "The root of Barry’s crisis is the materialist philosophy that shapes the laws, creating an unnatural balance of power."

Sobran seems to be taking lessons in punch-pulling from Buchanan and Reed. There's a lot more than just some faceless "materialist philosophy" at the core of the rot.