Customer Reviews

BLIND BASEBALL: A Father's War

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This book is nearly in Solzhenetsyn's league - and that's the major league for works in this genere. The author novelizes his own experiences with the surreal "family" court system in my native Michigan - of which I am also a surviving father - and in doing so paints a picture vivid in its absurdity, banality, and vileness that an uninformed reader might associate more readily with the Soviet Union - hence the reason that the Gulag comes so quickly to mind.
Like our former adversary, we have psychiatric prisons, where the inconvienent and uncooperative are sent, drugged, and left incommunicado, when it suits the organs of state power to do so. This Dostoyeveski of American fatherhood writes what rings true - as I read, it was "deja vu, all over again" as my thoughts flashed back to my own experiences at the hands of those my taxes supposedly pay to protect the innocent.
The story is of a man who married badly, to what he calls a "human hand grenade," had children, and for their sakes, stayed, like a latter-day Hosea, with his wife of whoredoms to the bitter end, hostage to his loyalty to his children, and to a passion for a woman who utterly scorned and failed him. Like many a man who has beaten the odds in escaping the ghetto, the author bore wounds not visible to himself, but gapingly obvious to the "idiot savant" whose sole talent in life was an ability to play her intellectual superiors like a harp.
More than a page-turning story, this novelization of divorce purgatory, in which the protagonist's most exquisite pain is not for his own suffering, but for that of his children, this book is also an old-school conservative/libertarian indictment of F.D.R.'s Welfare State, in tones that remind this reader of Atlas Shrugged, as Mr. Green digresses to examine the cause of the troubles visited upon his family, which are only the symptoms of the Moocher State brought to its logical perfection. Welfare subsidizes the woman who wants to destroy her family for short-term gain, funds her sloth, and the producers are made to subsidize it all, minus the state's cut of the loot. (Mr. Green owns up to his share of the mistakes, including the cardinal one of marrying Sal, the anti-wife, but that in no way diminishes her guilt or that of her enablers.)
This book now rests on the same shelf as my copies of Stockdale, Sharansky, Denton, and the other confessors who have stood their ground against the last century's great killer of body and spirit - the Leviathan State. It belongs there, as the feminist-led assault on the traditional family is of one and the same character as those of the other corecive utopias that have blighted humanity within living memory. Could it happen here? It is already, and woe to the unfortunates who fall into its clutches! As Paul Craig Roberts once asked, in writing about another kind of judicial misconduct, will it produce a latter-day Count of Monte Cristo to fight it? It's a wonder that it has not already bred many worse than him among its' many victims.
-Lloyd A. Conway