the world died in the decades after that , when the war was won and tv caught on and even the least prophetic soul glimpsed how all the pieces could be hammered together , if the market and the slogans were just right , and salesmen perfected their patriotic pitch and figured how to leash and program the capricious angels of our dreams , the necessary imps of the unseen that always had to be tolerated before , when the signals were invisible and could only be seen in dark rooms with lidded eyes focused somewhere in the blank above the sparking dial , and they tapped into the shows and showed that all the airy unseen angels visiting our vacuum tube altars were really only floating spheres of brand-name soap .