Hokey, Boomer

There was a brief time in the 20th century when it was more fun to debunk the supernatural. Oz had to step forth from behind his curtain. Rahan showed cavemen their witch doctors never really had magic powers. Scooby-Doo&crew pulled rubber masks off charlatans. The religion of the future was an unexploded nuke. The Addams Family astonished and rankled their audience by being more human than human.

 

Then at some point flim-flam flipped from a villainous trait to a hero. Instead of embracing fantasy as its own genre with its own rules, the public conflated it with reality, until no matter the genre, the crazy-stupid explanation for characters' experiences became the only possible one. Instead of getting bitten by radioactive spiders, superheroes now get bitten by magic spider-pixies, because that makes way more sense.

I'd be curious if anyone's located the exact tipping point there. Most might blame the '90s and the New Age movement, but my gut screams "Reagan" at the top of its rugae, the time when hippies, after a decade of post-'60s defeat, found themselves too much at home as bank tellers and electricians to reconcile with their old acid trips and needed pop culture to validate them, meshing all too well with their former traditionally religious opponents' own desperation to validate the supernatural.

But it's been long enough for the tide to turn again, and it is unlikely to turn toward reason so much as toward a monomaniacal, parochial caricature of it, a delusion of reason just as the current mysticism is a delusion of openmindedness. By next decade we should brace ourselves for the backlash, and the crackdown. GenZ will turn fascist when it hits its thirties.