An ideological train crash

Mentally disabled actors are victims of modern 'blacking-up', says campaigner | Society | The Observer.

Nicola Clark, mother of an actress with Asperger's, thinks its "offensive" that healthy actors should play the parts of the mentally ill. When did Britons become so prone to take offence? Ah yes, that would be when they worked out that the left was prepared to frame laws to prevent their "offence." Laws that privilege them vis-a-vis the dwindling "communities" of the independent-minded, the contented and the brave. Mrs Clark's daughter comments;

It is not just mentally disabled actors who lose out when non-disabled people are employed to act them. Audiences think they are getting an authentic portrayal of a mentally disabled person, but they're not. It's not like putting on a different accent or learning what it was like to be raised in a different era. You can't understand what it is like to have a mental disability unless you've really lived with it. When non-disabled people try to portray us, they tend to fall back on stereotypes that have done our community so much harm in the past.

That, dear girl, is called acting. It is an art that requires, above all, empathy; the ability to put yourself, in imagination, inside another personality. Acting is not about the audience "learning what it was like to be raised in a different era" or indeed, necessarily, about learning anything. Acting is an art and, like all art, is about the human condition. You don't have to be authentically fey to play Tinkerbell or to have experienced Auschwitz to portray a victim of the Shoah. As someone suffering with an illness of which a key symptom is "limited empathy", you can be forgiven. Your mother however, by your own logic can't understand your point and is, therefore, merely on the make.

That it is now considered offensive for a white actor to "black up" is ridiculous. Acting is about portraying artistic truths about humanity. Only the simple minded, or the craftily malicious exploiting the simple minded, could confuse that with banal truths about the actor. Olivier's Othello was a triumph;  a triumph these idiots would have prevented. Having killed those opportunities for artistic expression they are now determined to ensure there is no repetition of my favourite performance in the history of cinema; Al Pacino as blind ex-serviceman Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman. Not to mention Dustin Hoffman's performance in Rain Man.

As always, when you have accepted one piece of leftist pseudo-logic (perhaps out of kindly, if sickeningly condescending, concern for some group or other's hurt feelings) they stuff more down your gentle, kindly throats. Wake up people! They will not stop until your every thought is bound like Gulliver in Lilliput. Stir now, before myriad threads of insubstantial logic allow them to restrain your every action.

There is no idiocy the Guardian would not advance if only slotted into their banal template of "X-ism giving offence to the X community." It gets worse.

In another sign that Clark has launched her campaign at a turning point, Channel 4 will next week launch Cast Offs, a comedy drama about the making of a Survivor-type reality TV programme featuring physically disabled characters. Created by Jack Thorne, who has written for Shameless and Skins, Tony Roche, who has written for The Thick Of It, and Alex Bulmer, the programme features thalidomide victims, dwarfism and the face-disfiguring cherubism, a rare genetic disorder.

Well done, the British left. You have revived the freak show. I am sure the participants will feel the same gratitude their predecessors had for those kindly Victorian entrepreneurs. At least, when turning their misfortunes to profit, they didn't ghettoise them as a separate "community".