My name's Mike Flores and I do many things. I am the 20 some odd year head of the Chicago Psychotronic Film Society. Our events have included a party for the late Russ Meyer, director of films such as SUPERVIXEN and FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL, KILL, hosted an event with John Cleese of Monty Python fame, held parties for Kenneth Anger the underground filmmaker, Penn and Teller hosted a Halloween party for us at Excalibur, Bill Murray hosted a party for our members at his home, and much more. The society was created by myself and the late Del Close of Second City and Improv Olympic fame.
I DJ a new form of music called mashups in the Chicago area under the name DJ Psychomike. I've done this about 4 or 5 years at places like THE LIAR'S CLUB and SONOTHEQUE.
I work as an entertainer, writer, producer, and director and writer. My shows have included BETTIE PAGE UNCENSORED which ran for 43 weeks and was made into a movie, THE ACID TEST 1966, CUBS WIN!, BRING ME THE HEAD OF DEL CLOSE which ran for 33 weeks and played two theatre festivals.
I also did comedy with Del Close for about 10 years as the Pope of the Church of Subgenius on radio, TV and live appearances.
I am strictly an amateur at history, but as Stan Brakhage the underground filmmaker told me, the word amateur when broken down, means with love.
Because I did spend years in the south, tonight's talk will be a both more personal, and different. I will be floating through time on this one, from what I saw as a kid, to our present illusions. The hidden truths, the illusions and just maybe, the why.
The War Between The States is not immune to time fashioning what happened. In many ways, the war has not ended. The perception of the war, almost always obscuring the realities, keeps the war ongoing.
I was born in California . My father was Mexican. His parents came across the border in Texas and had him here. So he was by birth a citizen as the rules were then. My mom was from Irish stock her family had come here as a result of British policies. That they paired up after meeting in the Navy (both served) how a woman from the deep south at the height of segregation ended up with a Mexican baffles me. And they got away with it. It was against the law for other races to marry in those days, but I LOVE LUCY was huge so maybe that explains it. The only celebrity I know of that was an Irish Mexican was Anthony Quinn. Famous for playing ZORBA THE GREEK. I bet there aren't many Irish Mexicans in Ireland.
I grew up in Japan raised by a Japanese nanny, much the same way white children on the plantation I suppose were raised by the female slaves. From Japan we moved to the American South. Virginia, followed by South Carolina and then Georgia . The generation I grew up with had to get out of the house. There were no video games and endless cable channels. Kids on the block would form baseball teams and fight pretend war games. Armed with toy guns we would re-enact Combat episodes in the woods nearby. Sometimes in the dirt coming up with arrowheads on the ground or old musket balls.
Everywhere then was the Civil War.
There were trading cards that came with bubble gum that showed in gruesome detail the violent horrors of the war. There were monuments to the Confederate Generals everywhere. Places that battles took place at had placards explaining the battles that happened there. The big store chain was Winn Dixie. As in Win- Dixie. Rebel Yell whiskey had a Confederate general on the label and was not for sale in the North. The billboards the whiskey had showed the General on raised horse holding a sword, and the tag line was something like IF YOU SEE IT FOR SALE IN THE NORTH, TELL US. WE'LL STOP THEM!
GONE WITH THE WIND was only released every seven years and never shown on TV. The near hysteria over the re-release would go on for a year before the actual date.
I watched COMBAT one night and a southerner was shown on the program. The episode was written and directed by Robert Altman who would later do MASH, and in the episode the soldier carries a southern flag and makes jokes about the north throughout the episode " My granddaddy would never let a car named Lincoln at his home" and jokes like that. We as kids tried to play Civil War battles, but no kid wanted to be a Yankee.
There was Aunt Fanny's Cabin. Located in Smyrna Georgia on Campbell Road. It was the most astonishing restaurant I had ever been to. It was huge and always packed, with rows of tables so you were really eating picnic style. A pre-teen black boy would come out in rags with a chalkboard around his neck He would recite what was on the board:
HOWDY FOLKS!
WHAT'LL IT BE?
ALL COMPLETE DINNERS
OUR FAMOUS FRIED CHICKEN
GEN-U-INE SMITHFIELD HAM
CHARCOAL BROILED STEAK
FRESH RAINBOWN TROUT
Then the little boy would take off for the next table. Thing is, the chicken really was the best I ever had. Marinated overnight in buttermilk, crispy on the outside and tender and juicy on the inside.
Stone Mountain had carved on one side Confederate Generals. My first time there some branch of the Ku Klux Klan was having a family picnic. No one wore the robes; there were no confederate flags only the stars and stripes. About 100 feet away was an all Black church group having a picnic. No one yelled at the other. No one threw rocks. It was the south.
The schoolbooks I had, here's one called ROBERT E. LEE AND THE ROAD OF HONOR printed by Random House had lines like this:
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A GREAT AMERICAN WHO WAS GUIDED BY SOMETHING HE BELIEVED TO BE THE MOST PRECIOUS QUALITY IN LIFE. IT IS CALLED A SENSE OF HONOR, A FORCE INSIDE US WHICH NOT ONLY TELLS US WHAT IS THE RIGHT THING FOR US TO DO BUT ALSO IMPELS US TO DO IT. ROBERT EDWARD LEE OF VIRGINIA, WHO LED THE ARMIES OF THE SECEDING SOUTH IN THE WAR FOR SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE , WALKED STRAIGHT ON HONOR'S ROAD ALL HIS LIFE.
BUT THE STORY OF LEE OF VIRGINIA DOES NOT HAVE AN END, NOT SO LONG AS MEN RESPECT AND REMEMBER COURAGE AND HIGH PURPOSE AND A SENSE OF DUTY AND HONOR.
My mom was no fan of the old south. She loved GONE WITH THE WIND but for the wrong reasons, at least as guys saw it. I have always suspected that Southern women see in Scarlet O'Hara the Irish spirit in love with the land who kept the towns running when the men were gone to war and then the women rebuilt it from the ashes. Which is what southern women actually did. For men, GONE WITH THE WIND is the story of men dealing with war and fickle women. For women I suspect there is much more.
At least, back then. As a child thinking about GONE WITH THE WIND…..
The Irish that went north took their love of the land in Ireland and kept it with them over the generations. Northern Irish Americans have a point of view and are vocal about it when it comes to Ireland.
The Irish in the south however saw the hills and mountains, the cliffs and lakes, and fell in love with the south.
Recently I watched on the news as about a dozen people from hate groups united to march through a Jewish neighborhood they didn't live in to protest black crime. I watched as the hate group carried southern battle flags, and the hundreds who had shown up organized by the Progressive Labor Party, a pro Stalin group, threw rocks- at police. Then in order to teach the hate groups a lesson that frankly eludes me, the anti-hate crowd broke into and looted nearby Jewish homes, attacked cars and more. So angered they were by the rebel flag. The tiny hate group didn't even live in the neighborhood! One looter explained the hatred she had for the stars and bars, a flag that to her stood for treason and slavery. States remove their battle flags from their state seals, colleges are pressured to ban confederate flags.
Long gone from TV and film are references to the southerner who still talks bad about the north, but would die for it. Gone is Fanny's. You can travel all over Atlanta and only hear northern accents. I have seen the history change twice in my life about a period that was over 100 years ago.
My mother tried to instill in me a dislike for the old south and for segregation. I was raised in Japan during my formative years and born in California. This isn't my war.
So, where to start?
Let's begin with the first war on this soil over slavery.
The abolitionist and religious movements that hated slavery had painted a picture of constant whippings, brandings and sexual abuse. In fact, according to their propaganda, there was little time for actual work. British Dunmore suggested to the secretary of state in 1772 using slaves to quell war with foreign powers believing the slaves would rise up and seek revenge on their masters for the daily abuse.
In 1775 Dunmore 's Proclamation placed Virginia into a state of martial law. It offered freedom to slaves and bonded servants and families if they would fight for the British. Thousands fled the plantations and signed up. It wasn't however motivations of revenge that they fled to the British side for. It was the promise of liberty. Whoever offered the best concrete offer of freedom would get their support.
George Washington urged for Dunmore to be crushed.
At the Boston Massacre of 1770 when Crispus Attucks, a freed black was killed, slaves must have asked "Whose freedom did he die for?"
As the war moved south the former slaves found themselves in Florida when the end came. The British took off on their ships and advised the blacks to head to Canada. It is a long walk from Florida to Canada .
Some tried to swim out to the boats to leave with the British. The sailors were ordered to use their machetes to chop the arms off the slaves to keep them from boarding. Yet they kept coming. Because on the beach, angry former colonists were killing them as they swam in.
The tortures, lynching and murders that befell these blacks as they journeyed north have never been made into a movie or novel. The industrialized states barred entry by blacks (that's why the Underground Railroad ended in Canada, not Illinois). It is unknown how many made it to Canada. Until recently it was thought less than 800 blacks joined the British, now we know through records it was in the thousands. It is safe to say that thousands were murdered in gruesome fashion on the journey to Canada.
The British would end all slavery in 1832 in all their territories. If the slave owners had lost the Revolution, they still would have lost all their slaves without question almost 30 years before our civil war, without firing a shot or losing one life. Ironic hardly covers it.
The stories that were told in the slave's quarters were that the tortures and murders were longer and more chilling in the north. Those that had fled with families faced horrors so bad, that the record was until recently, "forgotten".
Right about now you should strap on your seat belts and buy me a beer because we are getting to the second war about slavery in this country.
Civil War buffs all know the Robert E. Lee quote, 'IT IS WELL THAT WAR IS SO TERRIBLE, ELSE WE SHOULD GROW TOO FOND OF IT`
But here's one you may have missed: WHEN YOU ELIMINATE THE BLACK CONFEDERATE SOLDIER, YOU'VE ELIMINATED THE HISTORY OF THE SOUTH.
So I read these words over. When you eliminate the black confederate soldier- what black confederate soldier? What is Robert E. Lee talking about? What did the north and the south tell themselves were the reasons for war in the first place? What really happened?
When I lived down south I had daily reminders of the War Between the States. Bumper stickers that had a rebel flag and the words, DON'T BLAME ME I VOTED FOR JEFF DAVIS, license plates with confederate battle flags and some cutesy rebel soldier with a leg in a cast and the words HELL NO I AIN'T FERGETIN'. When I moved up north I had discovered that the north had no interest in the war. Though a great deal of interest in Lincoln. Note the name of this restaurant. The Lincoln Restaurant on Lincoln Avenue in the Land of Lincoln!
It was a let down that the battles I had memorized and day dreamed about were ignored up here, but all that would change with Ken Burns and his PBS show. Suddenly restaurants with southern themes and food swept the big cities of the north. Krispy Kreme donuts suddenly appeared. And horror of all horrors, today you can buy REBEL YELL whiskey in finer liquor and wine stores in the north. I highly recommend the whiskey by the way. I began to find people interested in the war that continues to define us, even though the message long ago replaced the facts. This is knowledge that can't fit on a bumper sticker or a license plate. Much of it will be new. And yes we will find out why what happened to the runaway slaves of the south during the first war over slavery would play a role in the second.
Ken Burns covered Lincoln and the victorious north very well. But there was no episode on Jeff Davis. Imagine covering WW 2 and FDR, and never mentioning Hitler!
