DATELINE–SOuth of the MAson-dixon line

Before the madness of MULTIMEDIA, before the sighting of SILICON in the valley, before even the rush towards the GOLD in them thar hills, cotton, yes COTTON, caught the fancy of a landed aristocracy seeking the Good Life in a hospitable clime. Why yes, there was in our recent history a long, long time when citizens were citizens and class rule was the law of the land rather than a sneaking suspicion of guilt-ridden intellectuals and the underlings who brought them coffee. As for the rest, well, batten down the chattel, it looks like a rough shod ride over fin de siecle seas.

THIS JUST GIN: The human interest story we are working on for the late 20th Century news, dates back to the waning years of the 1700s, when a migration from New England to the Lower South was prompted not by physical hardship, not because of religious persecution nor in the search for tillable land. No, the demigods in this graphic shift south towards their future were concerned with neither life nor liberty, nor even the right to own property. Rather, impelled by the desire to jump-start their social and economic status, these young Yankees headed SOuth of the MAson-dixon line to join the royal court of King Cotton. Prior to the debut of Solid Gold, predating the first edition of My Multimedia, the Lower South played host to the express elevator that rocketed from ground zero of a new american dream to the Live/Live lofty life of the supposedly wealthy plantation owner.

They were on the make, these white, bright migrant planters, these coddled masses yearning to get rich quick and stay that way at any social cost. This unique challenge was an awesome responsibility for a generation so young, so greedy, so clueless: To make the South their future entailed inventing a society of the immediate future. And once the shape and form of this great society could be agreed upon by their fellow upstarts, well, from the peak of such a bright and shining historical moment they would ravish her and take her for all that she was worth.

But who made Cotton King so soon after the War of Independents expelled the monarchists from the newly federalized states of Vespucci’s America? A former mechanic–a mechanical engineer if you will–and alumnus of Yale College traveled south to Savannah in search of his fortune. Failing to secure a job, he took up semi-permanent guest status on a plantation, capitalizing on a wealthy widow’s good will. Here, he was educated about the beneficences and vicissitudes of “The Crop.” Cotton was the content of this crop, the very fabric of white southerners’ lives. And cotton was harvested all along the Lower South from the long-lint varieties of the islands to the short-lint strain growing upland. Cotton, COTTON was everywhere but nary an engine to separate the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys, the masters from all they surveyed. Indeed if cotton were to rule as the killer crop of this new southern kingdom, a machine or gin was necessary to separate the valued fiber from its closely held seed.

Owing to his entrusted status, the young Yale-educated mechanic found himself with a considerable amount of spare time on his hands. He amused himself and his host by constructing a cotton gin. A revolving, wire-studded cylinder brushed against a screen pulling cotton fibers through the screen’s slats, but leaving the seeds, too large to pass, behind. When the wires became clogged with clean cotton, a second set of cylinders equipped with brushes freed the wires from the accumulation of lint.

PASS THE GIN. Cotton is ordained King. The south rises and falls and then rises again. But do not look for parallels just yet, gentle reader, for this soul train has not come to a complete stop. We must also note the carriage of King Cotton’s court lest there be a secret message for us in their peculiar deportment. For these were po’ or’nary folk suddenly rewarded with the fabulous sum of a million (crucified black) bodies’ labor. Even a dog has an excuse for planting a bone and these folk were in desperate search of just that: a holy order, a reason, a technique and a logic. Could their fabulously theatrical (i.e., simulated) wealth, based, in large part, on the relative classlessness of the invisible servants who were worked to anonymous deaths in the back fields, have some degree of significance in deciphering this particular bend of the Southern Spirit?

Yes and no. Status symbols alone will not keep a man-made society running, well-oiled and in tip-top condition. For lasting Control and Focus, one requires the services of a machine. Only a machine such as the Cotton Gin could have rendered both permanent and transparent the ruthlessly arbitrary authority of the plantation owners; transferring the unbearable weight of a savage, inhuman slavery atop the silent, iron shoulders of Technology.

Technology to this day remains the plantation owner’s mute heir, the (web) master’s automatic salvation and ultimate, if forever klandestine, justification.

And that’s the way it happened folks. Let us go forth and witness this history lest we all be led unwittingly to repeat it.