Lothar

When I was a kid on the West Side of New York City, read that Manhattan, but to any real Manhattanite, the small island was New York, the streets would clear at about six P.M.. every night, not because your mother hollered out the window, and many did, but because the radio shows would start.

“I Love a Mystery,” with Doc, Jack and Reggie, was my favorite with “Captain Midnight,” and “Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy,” close seconds. They were well-done productions, with good actors, and it required only your ears and a portion of your brain to become part of the action.

As children of the depression we did with little, but really didn’t know it, for everyone else was in the same shape. In the local movie houses we had these wonderful shows, “Chapters,” when you could get your hands on a nickel, later a dime, and of course, the wonderful inventions in comic strips, most of which weren’t funny, but very well-done indeed.

I remember one in particular, “Mandrake the Magician,” who had a top hat, a cane, cape, small mustache and a girl friend constantly in attendance. He was a friend of the “Bantu Poison People.” Always at hand was “Lothar,” a huge Black man who wore a leopard skin vest over huge muscles and, of all things, if I recall correctly, a Fez perched atop his pronounced African features. You never had to think about Lothar, he was always there, always available and you knew, without being told, that he was true to Mandrake, perhaps even unto death.

Many years later I started thinking about all the wonderful characters we had in our youth, and started to catalog them for my own amusement. There was “Red Ryder,” and his brave little Indian sidekick “Scout,” “the “Green Hornet,” and his faithful Japanese servant “Kato,” who somehow became Filipino the day after Pearl Harbor, “Daddy Warbucks” and his huge East Indian manservant, and, of course, the “Lone Ranger,” with faithful Indian companion, “Tonto.” Incidentally, I have been told that “Kimosabe” really means, “wet rag on a bush,” honest. I began to get the impression that being powerful, and Caucasian, entitled you to some kind of non-white support person. Could this be racism of an earlier, simpler time? You bet your bippie it was.

I was bemused by this fact and thought, for just a moment, that we were far too sophisticated these days to permit that sort of thing. It was an errant, foolish thought as I looked upon too many contemporary action heroes who perpetuate those stereotypes.

One of the new breed is Robert Parker, author of the “Spencer,” series, one of the best-selling authors of our time. Spencer has as his alter ego, “Hawk,” who is Black and doesn’t take crap from anyone, holds his own with Spencer when they decide to slug it out, just for the hell of it, and has a nefarious background to boot. But Robert Parker doesn’t stop there. Spencer’s girl friend is Jewish, making Parker an enlightened man. I don’t think so.

But Parker is the exception, n’est pas? Take another look. The marvelously funny character “Inspector Closeau,” had as his faithful manservant, “Kato.” Then there’s John Kellerman’s character “Dr. Alex Delaware,” who has as his other persona, a gay detective who would put Mike Hammer to shame. A little change of pace here.

There are many more and that’s why Dashell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, and above all, Ross MacDonald, were of a totally different stripe. They created knights errant who worked alone, (if you can forgive Nick and Nora Charles who drank extraordinary numbers of martinis and had a dog named “Asta,”) and didn’t ask for quarter. They were men in a time when it was totally a man’s world and these characters didn’t have it in them to bolster their egos with someone of another, presumably inferior and subservient race.

But perhaps things are getting better, or too many people are getting wise to the earlier forms of discrimination. Finally, the perpetuation of racism and the put down of women seems to have faltered. I can’t see Danny Glover kow-towing to Mel Gibson in any way, shape or form. Indeed in the “Lethal Weapon” series, Glover is a pronounced father-figure and bastion of sanity. If you remember the fight scene between Nick Nolte and Eddy Murphy in “48 Hours,” you will remember that Murphy did very well until Nolte “sly-rapped” him. Denzel Washington prevailed over Gene Hackman in that submarine thriller and Morgan Freeman is such a quietly powerful presence that he almost never loses.

Both on TV and in the movies women have come into their own and not as nurturers or supporting-their-men kind of women. When’s the last time, in a good movie, that you saw a supporting female actor stand by while her male counterpart gets his ass kicked? Jamie Lee Curtis, as a rookie cop going after a psycho, is fine and “Dr.Quinn, Medicine Woman,” is strong and stands up. She is a hero, notice how we’ve stopped using “actress” and “heroine” in favor of actor or hero? Sharon Stone blows away a thoroughly despicable Gene Hackman in a shoot out, and I wouldn’t want to tangle with the female detectives on the tube these days.

There is a sea of change in what is acceptable. Prejudice is here, it’s poisonous, it deprives this nation of desperately needed creativity and intelligence. It is intrinsically evil and exists in many forms. For years I railed against anti-Semitism on my cablevision talk show. I knew, however, that anti-Gentile feelings were pronounced in many Jewish circles because I moved in them as an in-law in a Jewish family. Believe me, on first hand authority, I know of powerful anti white feelings in the “Black” community.

Ethnic cleansing stunned many and I wonder why? Perhaps it is simply that we just don’t want to think about prejudice, there’s enough on our plates already...unless you are Black or Asian or of a different faith. Ask Moslem Americans about the new, swarthy “middle eastern” terrorists and villains prevalent in many American movie and television productions. Don’t you get it? No matter who or what you are, someone is going to look down upon you. What a bloody, stupid waste of time and human emotion.