BLIND BASEBALL

FOREWORD

Joseph Sobran

The novel you are about to read is the 1984 of modern family relations and domestic law.  “Blind baseball,” explained late in the story, is a fine image for the legal blood-sport it describes.

At first Blind Baseball reads like a mere story of an unusually bitter divorce.  Barry Ballinger, the hero-narrator whose wife seeks a divorce, is told by his first lawyer that under Michigan’s no-fault divorce laws, he has only a slender chance of gaining custody of his children.  Despite the supposed equality of the sexes under those laws, the odds heavily favor his vindictive wife Sal.  It makes no difference that Sal is a negligent, self-centered mother.  The father bears the heavy burden of proving it in court, before high-handed judges who don’t care what the evidence shows.  (One of the novel’s many revealing shocks is the reluctance of lawyers to fight vigorously for their clients if it means risking the wrath of the courtroom tyrants called judges.)

Barry’s assumption that the law is fairly reasonable proves an early casualty of experience.  He finds that winning possession of his children is going to be an uphill fight.  Equality of the sexes turns out to mean a shift in the balance of power between them, to the detriment of men – in reality, a new kind of inequality.  His wife and her lawyer mean to make the most of it.

But this turns out to be only the beginning of Barry’s Orwellian torment.  He is stripped of his children (and even visitation rights), his property, his income, his reputation, his livelihood and clientele, his freedom, and very nearly his sanity.  He discovers the astonishing gap – the actual opposition – between his assumptions about the rule of law and the hard facts of arbitrary power in egalitarian America.  He encounters the irrational realities of lawyers, judges, psychiatrists, bureaucrats, social workers, and “liberated” women and their parasitic male accomplices.  The battle of the sexes is now set within a larger order, far more sinister than Barry had dreamed.  Blind Baseball may be fiction, but that order is all too real.

Barry finds himself systematically punished for trying to take responsibility for his six children, the ultimate victims of a mad system governed by a mad materialist philosophy.  Under the “no-fault” system, the victim is held guilty, and the burden of proving his innocence verges on the impossible.  Whatever the laws in the books say, the system rewards predators, because it is itself predatory.

Yet a surprising thing happens.  Unlike Orwell’s Winston Smith, Barry Ballinger, throughout his ordeals, never quite loses his sanity.  On the contrary, he almost miraculously finds it.  In one phantasmagoric episode, he finds himself confined in a mental hospital, unable to obtain release, without explanation and incommunicado.  Slowly his bitter experiences of legal in-fighting give him a deepening comprehension of his plight – a plight he shares, to some extent, with all rational, responsible, and productive men under the welfare state and its unspoken code.  A generation ago Barry’s story might have seemed incredible; today it reflects a way of life all too many of us are familiar with.

Barry is peculiarly unlucky, but the book’s shock lies in the reader’s realization that his fate is no fluke.  He is describing the system we all inhabit now.  And anyone who happens to make enemies who know how to work that system, as Sal and her allies do, may meet a similar fate.  The law is the enemy of men – especially honest men.

Barry sees that “feminist” is a misnomer.  The welfare state serves the interests of certain kinds of women -- but also the sort of men they attract, exemplified by Sal’s sponging lovers.  Barry is horrified to see these men moving in with his children, but t