When my son Toby recently proposed that he and a friend interview me as a bonus episode for their comic book podcast, one of his suggested questions was, “Does the rise of superheroes during WWII–their slump thereafter–and their rise again during the cold war corollate with real world events.”

That really confused me. In my own timeline, the Cold War began immediately after World War II. And it would never have occurred to me in the early 1950s, when I was a little kid bouncing off the furniture with an old baby blanket pinned around my neck for a cape and pretending to be Superman, that I was living in the middle of a superhero slump.

But apparently I was. As Toby explained it, there had been a great proliferation of superheroes during the war, but by the time I began reading comics around 1952, they’d been pruned back to just Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. And even those titles weren’t particularly memorable — not compared to Carl Barks’ brilliant Uncle Scrooge stories, which I was reading at the same time. The superhero genre wouldn’t get back on track until 1956, by which time I’d outgrown the kid-oriented comics of the day.

Once I started to think about it, though, a number of things fell into place, and I realized that the answer to Toby’s question had to do with science. After the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, science came to be viewed as a destructive force rather than a savior, and that made science-based superheroes a lot less appealing. Over the next decade, even science fiction backed off from scientific extrapolation in favor of sociological SF, reality trips, and rationalized fantasy.

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With the outcome of this week’s elections in the US, we have moved one step closer to the complete meltdown of the democracy-and-chaos partnership. Not only has the partnership consistently failed to address the economic and environmental crises of the moment, but the two partners are now at one another’s throats.

The Democrats remain bound to the failing democracy vision, even though it is no longer able to produce a viable campaign platform. Meanwhile, the Tea Party Republicans have pledged their souls to the darker side of chaos and seem to be looking forward to dismantling as much of the structure of government as possible.

That’s how these things always go, so there’s no use crying too many tears over it. It’s the process by which every fossilized partnership passes into the dustbin of history. The real challenge of the next few years will be to preserve the health of the planet and its peoples as they come under unrelenting assault from a dying system.

That’s exactly what the adherents of the younger holism and horizontalism visions are already trying to do. But there’s about to be an even younger vision joining the mix and sending things off in a new direction — because as the chaos vision becomes completely unmoored from reality, the creative imagination vision will be set loose to follow its own path.

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