Network (above) skewers network televsion as it existed in 1976 and, more importantly, predicted a future media dystopia as close to hand as your remote control.     

In this scene, the President of the fictional UBS Network attempts to "convert" the network's insane news anchor to the theology of the global marketplace.  It's one of the most prescient and hilarious commentaries on money, power and global politics ever written.

Norman Lear has said of Network:  This is not a satire; it's a documentary.  

Rent it, buy it, watch it. 

You will find in Network the first imaginings of reality television in a country that was then celebrating the 200th Anniversary of the American Revolution and which had, only the year before, painfully extracted the last of its troops from Viet Nam.  Saturday Night Live was breaking network taboos in its first year on the air ('75-'76) and the Twin Towers had been standing sentinel over the foot of Manhattan for only three years.  

The following year -- 1977 -- I'd watch in amazement from the sidewalk near the New York Supreme Court in Foley Square as a mountain-climber from Queens,  George Willig, climbed the South Tower (2 WTC).   But I digress.

When Network was first released, I was working in the typing pool (IBM Selectric:  5 carbon copies) of a midtown law firm, studying for the LSAT and learning what it was like to be truly poor (rats in the lobby, cockroaches in the kitchen and la Migra pounding on our apartment door at 3 a.m. as  we listened to neighbors escaping through the building's otherwise unsued dumb-waiter system).  

When my husband and I had arrived in New York City the year before, it had been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and its pleas for help from the federal government had been famously rebuffed, prompting the notorious New York Daily News headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead."  

New York City thirty years ago.  New Orleans today.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Paddy Chayefsky's prophetic vision grows more eerily accurate with each passing year.  In 2006, this script was voted one of the top ten movie scripts of all-time by the Writer's Guild of America.

This posting has nothing whatsoever to do with mediation, negotiation, lawsuits, business or legal practice except that it is about power, the wielding of power and the illusion of power.

It's a Sunday digression.