(Going around the LawFare clock, starting at upper left, are three “formers:” they are a President, an attorney, and Porn Star, On the line below, left to right, are a current New Jersey Senator, a President’s son and a Texas Congressman. The courtroom circuses of the past week have been diizzying. The players include Mr. Trump as a constant allegedly malevolent presence, with supporting roles by Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen. Their emotional testimony increasingly appeared more political than legal in the salacious details spewed in court. Pundits say the trial’s result will likely to be determined by Judge Merchan’s final instructions to the Jury before they begin their deliberations on an offense that may not actually be criminal. The wheels of Justice are grinding elsewhere as well. The President’s son is to be arraigned on old gun charges, and Congress has a rare bicameral event in progress with Senator Mendendez and Rep. Cuellar both facing corruption charges. Only those actually in court are depicted in colorful pastel).

This edition of the Daily got wrapped up in something else. We were instructed to “not think” by Management and the Legal Section about other matters and we have tried our best. Like everyone else in the nation during this interesting season. Not our fault.

Management told us to cease and desist from the current production product- the history we are attempting to write about living in the collapse of a great world power. They don’t mind us talking about it all the time, but an example of the confusion is contained in the caption to the portraits that starts this essay. like this. “LawFare Week” has been a tawdry spectacle as promised up in New York. Stormy Daniels testified in the Donald Trump “business accounting” trial. “Hush Money” is the other popular name for it.affair.

In last week’s events, the former porn star vaulted to the stand, and gave what some pundits called a “gripping, weepy” account of her time with the former television host who later occupied the White House. The press was agog, as were legal scholars, but for differing reasons.

That case had become a laughingstock, and the messaging de jour is about the crucial testimony of a disbarred attorney convicted for previous perjury under oath. You can see why Management wanted on something else to let this episode in the shambling lurch toward the Big Election slide by.

Since we are aware this case- would it ever have been justified- would warrant, at most, a misdemeanor charge. But Alvin Bragg is following through on his campaign brag to punish Donald Trump, elevating his charges to a felonious case. The Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission had previously waved off any charges, so it was evident that this was just a part of the extensive LawFare campaign to get the presumptive GOP nominee in the next election.

The problem is that this shoddy case is the last one standing of the four that had been intended to keep the candidate tied up and locked down with gag orders through the campaign season. That Stormy’s testimony was the highlight of the international week with an Israeli offensive against the Hamas stronghold at Rafah in progress is enough to make us sigh.

Lawfare- not Rafah- appears to be a failed campaign, the legal one, anyway, since the other three have hit road-blocks on getting the gavel to come down and this is now the centerpiece of something that looks a bit like the incumbent is going to be shown to the door in an attempt to wrest another miracle victory for the people in power.

Anyway, Management told us to lay off for a minute and not think about it so we didn’t. Instead, we wound up back with the Green Book, which may exist someplace beside the Library section of the hard drive on the battered laptop we use for production.

Here is what we have been told to ignore: In what Red State called “one of the most shameful political dithers of the 21st century,” the Administration has tried to divide the baby on Israel, tap dance their way around the issue most of us support to try to appease a few thousand voters in Michigan’s Dearborn-istan. They have lost support of partisans on both sides.

We have little idea who is advising him, but they seem a bit delusional. One pundit typified the old political “middle of the road” as now being littered with yellow stripes and road kill. One left-of-center publication termed one of the new dismal polls bemoaning the situation as typical of “messaging mis-information.” From the New York Times.

So, you can see things are changing in a fairly dramatic manner. The stand in New York has been taken by Michael Cohen, former lawyer to the Candidate whose campaign must be destroyed at any cost. His testimony has the cloud of previous assorted perjuries to courts, Congress and the IRS under oath hanging over it. That is why we wound up with The Green Book. We promised not to think, so we didn’t. Instead, we went back to the backlist of Socotra House publications. It is a modest list of around a dozen titles, five or six of which are available for purchase. We sent a story last week that included a tip of our mental toppers to the first of those, the one titled “The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye.”

That is where the Legal Department got involved, since there is a relatively innocuous copyright issue tangled up in it. By way of background, we did not know we were writing a book at the time. The book started as a compendium of columns not unlike this one. It had been based on a popular comedy album of the time. Those things were flat circles made of vinyl that spun around on moving discs to produce sounds. This one was done by a group called “The Firesign Theater.” They in turn had borrowed their characters from long-dead novelist and political activist Dashiell Hammett.

The material we published in the ship’s thin foolscap newspaper was all produced by us and was all original. When it turned out to be moderately successful as a relic of interesting time we found our rights to what we had produced might better be characterized as a “derivative copyright.” We learned a lesson back then that the Management, Legal and Marketing Departments are still arguing about.

We are supposed to not be thinking, so we did. That took us back to a copyright not derived from anyone else. It was an unpublished manuscript penned in cursive ink script scrawled between 1978-80. Things seemed crzy then, but we had no idea what was to come. It was titled as “Nippon Notes” on the cover the last time we saw it. We knew it as “The Green Book” because that was the color of the cover.

There were some interesting pictures drawn or pasted onto the pages, and it had no copyright issues with anyone except possibly the Iranian students who seized the US Embassy in 1979. We were just offshore for some of that hoo-haw, so considering the events of the last 45 years, that would have been a good place to start. Since the notebook itself has disappeared in the wake of history, there are more complications in any publication efforts.

Some parts were digitized and saved due to some amateurish drawings of places strewn across a voyage that included Asia, Australia, Africa and the Middle East. It was enough to keep us distracted back in those days. We will re-engage in some of that while the real stuff continues to unfold with such current drama. We will cover that, eventually, but this is a moment for Legal shenanigans in our present time before we get back to political hysteria when the pool opens after Memorial Day.
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Management doesn’t want legal issues, you know? And Marketing is hysterical for completely different reasons. They think they have to sell both new and old products in a simultaneous swirl!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com