Musings on Concon "Criticism": The Case of Les Misérables...

I have been watching Andrew Davies's and the BBC's adaptation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables over the last several weeks. While recognsing that beauty and value are in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder, I have found Davies's adaptation of Hugo's massive classic a superb adaptation of the book, an adaptation that draws the viewer deeply into the drama and deeply into the realities of inequality that typified 19th century France.

One of the most interesting aspects of the show to me has been the response it has drawn from some viewers. Given the presence of Anglo-Black actors like David Oyelowo in the cast of Davies's Les Misérables the issue of "race" has reared its inevitable ugly head at sites like Amazon if among, at least at present, a minority of posters (this last may be a function of who does and who doesn't watch Masterpiece Theatre). Some are complaining and docking points from their reviews of Les Misérables not for aesthetic reasons, which are always in the social and cultural eyes of beholders anyway as I noted, but because of the presence of Anglo-Blacks in the cast. Others are complaining and docking review points arguing that the presence of Anglo-Black actors in the cast is ahistorical forgetting that Les Misérables is a work of fiction, that history is always about change and dynamic stasis, and that the demographics of the acting profession in the UK have been one of the things that has changed. In the final analysis, and somewhat ironically, the real people playing the race card are those who see the race of an actor first and foremost rather than seeing an actor as an actor regardless of his or her race. Such "reviewers" are not colour blind. They see race everywhere, in other words, including in Les Misérables.

I suspect that those making such "criticisms of Les Misérables are concons. So what do concon reviews tell us about the way a concon or flim flam conservative mind works? What does it tell us about the function of political and ideological correctness among concons? It clearly shows us that concons, though they decry others playing the race card, play the race card themselves and play it often. They, for instance, see an Anglo-Black in Les Misérables where a colour blind person would see an actor. They deduct aesthetic points from Les Misérables because they see Anglo-Blacks in Davies's and the BBC's Les Misérables. That is, as is quite evident from their posts, their only justification whatsoever for deducting points from their "reviews" of the series. It is not, by the way, the quality of the acting that is at the heart of their aesthetics, which these posts, as a general rule, fail to mention entirely. It is the race of the actor. This, of course, is patented political and ideological correctness. By the way, it is quite clear from watching this adaptation of Les Misérables that the acting because the acting in this adaptation has been of the highest quality making it difficult if not impossible for concons to play the they can't act card.

There are, by the way, two types of concons: conscious con cons and bot concons. Conscious concons claim that no one should see race while seeing race everywhere around them including in TV shows and movies. These concons are, in other words, inherently contradictory. Conscious concons manipulate rhetoric or discourse in order to manipulate the masses for their own political, economic, and cultural gain. They are, in sum, gobshites. Bot concons simply parrot or ditto the bullshite rhetoric of conscious concons. They are the manipulated masses.