"POST IMPERIAL DELIRIUM": A COPING MECHANISM FOR THE RAPIDLY DECLINING AMERICAN ECONOMY...

A cotton gin

"THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FINDS AMERICANS ENAMORED OF WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED, POST-IMPERIAL DELIRIUM"

The economic robustness of what had been a tumultuously divided cluster of English colonies only 74 years earlier became the legendary Industrial super-power by the 1850’s.  Even so, young America was poised to thrust itself forward into another period of political unrest manifested in the Civil War which spawned a virtual technological supernova firmly establishing the U.S. as a leading innovator of design combined with the manufacturing muscle to fight with global impact.  The defeat of the south marked a fundamentally groundbreaking transition from obsolete means of production that had existed since ancient times.  America, drunken with new wealth and the nouveau riche vanity of manifest destiny had forgotten how it so very recently shed the fetters of imperialism and set about the task of founding a global empire to market its products. 

A slave originated the idea of the cotton gin  in the 18th century and it revolutionized early industrial production of cotton turning America into an industrial superpower after the raw cotton was processed in textile mills in the north.

Today nobody wants anything that is American made except weapons and the confusion that has become Popular Culture.  

America, the country that dominated the automobile industry until the late twentieth century has failed to innovate and capture the new green market for vehicles
in the twenty-first century.

America has become purveyors of weapons along with the associated violence and sexual desperation of a culture that is terminally infected with a socially, economically and ethically and morally degenerating disease.  The American culture has no immune system, it is doomed to a death far more rapidly consuming than civilizations in the past.  America is no Egypt or Rome, Nor will if slowly fade away like its English counterpart.  The economic death of America will be likened to a heart attack, a catastrophic, instantaneous system failure!

A  cotton gin

Today, Americans who lived through the 1950’s and 1960’s remember a stable, prosperous America which appeared to have recovered from the ravages of The Great Depression but it was to be a short-lived revival.  The more the world followed the sterling example of America, gaining their freedom and self-determination the smaller the world became for American greed and exploitation, suddenly, just like southern slave owners who had to share the wealth with those they had formerly enslaved, America had to share the wealth of the world with those who had once been in awe of our countries industriousness.  Not only did they want and deserve to be given back their piece of the pie, they wanted a share of America’s international pie as well.  Each time a country gained independence from American financial interests they took a healthy chunk of business away until finally America woke up to discover it was no longer the great technological innovator, manufacturer and global distributor of commodities anymore, in fact the reverse had happened, it became a country of perpetual consumers living off of the hoarded fat of only 150 years or so rather than hundreds of years as compared to the dimming brilliance of Great Britain.  The companies that had helped build the American economy for the past 150 years abandoned America relocating the most profitable portions of their business that had once represented jobs for Americans to other countries.  Furthermore, these companies gradually lost control of their own businesses having to sell stock to foreign interests who naturally preferred to relocate a vast portion of operations to their own side of the world to enrich their own economies with jobs and opportunity leaving the carcasses of these businesses to die a slow ceremonious death in the states.  During the mid nineteenth century America became involved in the Opium Wars with China in an attempt to sell American made commodities there.  It was one of our first international attempts at imperialism.  

American slaves using a cotton gin

Most twenty-first century Americans are still psychologically riding the long subsided wave of their economic past.  It’s like a magic show where the magician has moved so fast that the audience is left in a state of awe.  Everybody saw it coming, nobody saw it leave but with a surety what used to be known as American prosperity has literally been evanished seemingly at the tip of a wizard’s wand.  What is more, the magicians act does not include the part where economic prosperity is restored.  It is really the end of the show and the beginning of what might be called, “Post Imperial Delirium” a condition where socioeconomic decline occurs so rapidly from a place of former dominance that those who are on the side of loss, unable to cope or understand the phenomenon fall into a dramatically unrealistic state of denial.  What else could explain the virtual silence with which Americans watched congress seize control of the Government literally shutting it down and threatening the economy and what might have been left of the reputation of the nation.  People who are encapsulated in a state of delirium are not aware of the things around them in the sense that others are.  They remain obsessively focused on the surreal alternate realities that haunt their altered consciousness responding to variables in the normal world merely because it is an unavoidable obstacle in the way of addressing the hallucinations that captivate their minds.

A black man using an automated cotton gin

The symptoms of Post Imperial Delirium are a behavior that suppresses logical survival instincts to the obviously volatile economic climate creating a false optimism prone to excessive consumerism leading to hopeless indebtedness.  Such things can be quantified as entering into mortgage agreements that far exceed the owner’s ability to pay within their reasonable lifetime, layering of indebtedness with credit even under the most extreme conditions of high interest rates due to credit that has been evaluated as bad credit.  Attempting to approximate the same lifestyle as ones parents during a time of great economic stability is central to the psychosis.  All of these and many more are symptoms are typical of Post Imperial Delirium.  The idea that one has to make substantial purchases right now before the commodity becomes so expensive literally doubling or tripling overnight even thought everyone agrees it is already far too overpriced in relation to its real value is the classic example. 

A cotton gin

A norther textile mill processing the cotton into fabric

Americans cannot face the reality that America is not the stable cow it used to be and in all probability will never again be that animal.  They watch hopelessly, listlessly waiting for some magic act to restore economic prosperity in the form of jobs and opportunity, education and such and somehow, some way, I fear Americans are looking to congress and the white house to conjure up these elusive deliverables… Most of all they do not visualize themselves as having the power to effect positive change to save the American dream.  They have relinquished their power to corrupt politicians and the mind they might have spent do fight back is otherwise occupied or enslaved to a meaningless job inadequate to do anything but keep them under an economic lock and chain.  Twenty-first century Americans are no better of than medieval serfs bound to the land of their lords… but todays lords are corporations which have sucked up everything leaving nothing to compete with them.  The twenty-first century has painted a hopeless landscape for most Americans who cannot break free from an economic spiral that leaves them struggling for breath!  Their coping mechanism has been denial.  Apathy has been the morphine of Americans who find themselves enamored of what can be called, “Post Imperial Delirium”.

The grave of Eli Whitney credited with the invention of the cotton jin but who actually got the idea from a slave who had invented a cotton-comb for removing the husk.  Eli mechanized the slaves invention and patented it in 1793.
Many inventions made by slaves were usurped by their masters who considered them and their ideas
to be their own property the same as modern corporations who employ engineers and industrial designers
to innovate new products for them.  The difference, of course, is that slaves did not get compensation or credit
for their contributions to American technology.  The slave who truly invented the concept of the
cotton gin is known today only as "Sam".

Written by D. Vollin

FOR THE BROTHAS CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL SALON

The optimism of the 1950's could not have anticipated such a rapid decline in
American manufacturing and importation of machinery and other products.

A GALLERY OF RELATED IMAGES

THE COTTON GIN REVOLUTIONIZED AMERICAN AGRICULTURE BELOW ARE IMAGES OF VARIOUS TYPES OF COTTON GINS 

A modern automated cotton gin

Scene depicting a northern textile mill

A cotton gin

A primitive cotton gin

Retail sales ad for a cotton gin

A Cotton gin.

THE OBJECTIVE OF THE FIRST AND SECOND OPIUM WARS WAS TO COMPEL CHINA, JAPAN AND OTHER ASIAN INTERESTS TO OPEN TRADE WITH WESTERN COUNTRIES. ORIGINALLY CHINA AND JAPAN HAD NOT INTEREST OR NEED FOR WESTERN COMMODITIES SO OPIUM WAS SMUGGLED IN CAUSING GREAT CULTURAL UNREST AND POLITICAL UPHEAVAL...

Summer Palace burnt by British in the 1st Opium War

18th Century ad depicting Chinese Opium addicts after Britain and France began to smuggle the
drug illegally into the country

Second Opium War Ad showing Western powers dividing the trade interests
of China, America is shown in the lower right

Chinese Opium addicts