If you thought it would be hard for TV to top the Summer of the Insatiable Sharks, Ravenous Bears,
Killer Bees and Stampeding Lizzie Grubman, you were wrong.

Two networks are racing to air prime-time specials this fall featuring mediums interviewing dead celebrities.

As Lisa de Moraes reported in The Washington Post, NBC and ABC are both doing such shows for
fall sweeps. "The November of the Chatting Dead," she dryly calls it.

In a culture so besotted with celebrity, we were bound to run out of upright luminaries to interview.
I may tune in if the mediums manage to conjure up the vengeful spirits of Natalie Wood or Nicole Simpson.
But the celebrity specter I'd really like to hear from is Paddy Chayefsky, the dazzling satirist who wrote
the eerily prescient 1976 movie "Network."

Mr. Chayefsky's ominous predictions from the Ford era about the damage to American democracy
from the Pac-Man game of networks gobbled by companies gobbled by other companies gobbled
by consortiums gobbled by foreign investors have come true.

W. continued to give away the store to Big Business last week, legally unleashing Microsoft and
signaling media conglomerates that they can conglomerate away — accelerating the centralization
of American power into the hands of a very few very rich people.

W. never met a merger he didn't like, except stems and cells. His White House has become a holding
company for Big Money and the Media Oligarchy — Murdoch, Gates, Case, Eisner, Redstone.

Mr. Gates is getting back his monopoly over the desktop computer and his reign as the Czar of Broadband.
And soon we'll have thousands of channels but they'll all be controlled by the same few moguls.

At least before we had a diversity of trash in our media. Now we're zooming toward a collective mentality,
severely limiting the voices that may be heard and muting opposing views. A quarter of American culture
will be filtered through Murdoch's sensibility, a quarter through AOL Time Warner, a quarter through
Mickey Mouse, a quarter through Viacom.

W., afraid he will be blamed, as Dad was, for the cratering economy, has been going out the past
few days echoing Poppy's "Message: I Care."

After the unemployment numbers rose sharply to 4.9 percent on Friday, the president rushed out
of the Oval Office to commiserate: "Any American out of work is too many Americans out of work."

But the fanfare for the common man rings hollow, given that Bush Inc. is refusing to turn over documents
to Congress about the secret deliberations of Dick Cheney and energy lobbyists cooking up their drill &
spill energy plan and is knocking down regulatory hurdles, further pleasing Big Energy, Big Media, Big Oil,
Big Tobacco, Big Telecom and Big Weapons Manufacturers.

A majority of Americans did not elect W. A majority of voters didn't even elect him. A new book
about Florida and the Supreme Court decision, featured on this week's Newsweek cover, is titled
"The Accidental President." His real constituents are the corporations that gave him $100 million,
the biggest political haul in history.

In "Network," the crazed anchor Howard Beale reveals on the news one night that his network has
been bought by a corporation and that corporation is being bought by a consortium of banks and
insurance companies controlled by the Arabs.

Think of how mad Howard Beale would be today. There are so many examples to choose from:
MapQuest, a Web site that provides directions, was swallowed by America Online, which swallowed
Time Warner, which owns CNN. General Electric, the company that makes light bulbs and engines
on fighter jets, owns NBC. Disney, which owns studios, theme parks and sports teams, owns ABC.

In the movie, the C.E.O. who owns the network explains to Beale that the world is "one vast and
ecumenical holding company."

"There is no America," he says. "There is no democracy. There is only I.B.M. and ITT and AT&T
and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
The world is a business, Mr. Beale!"

And just as Beale railed: "There is not a single law on the books to stop them!"

How totally sane the mad prophet turned out to be.