The Queen of England pardoned Alan Turing for his crime of being gay. That’s over 60 years after the state chemically castrated him for the crime and just 59 years after he killed himself as a result at the age of 41. Better late than never, you say? I don’t think so. I think that late is exactly the same as never. If you show up one minute late to stop an innocent man from being killed, you might as well have never shown up. Better later than never, is a phrase you can apply to lesser things. Sorry we wrongly locked you up for a couple of years. Here’s a hundred thousand dollars to try to make make up for it. That’s better later than never. Sorry we castrated and killed you. That’s not better later than never. That’s exactly the same as never.
In the video over at Crooks & Liars, sculptor Glyn Hughes rightly asks, “What about all the other gay men who were prosecuted? Don’t you think it rather says that if you’re useful to the state, the law doesn’t apply to you? We’ll let you off.” Indeed. How about one big apology? “We’re sorry that we allowed hatred and ignorance and bigotry to rule our laws in England for hundreds of years and so ruined the lives of countless gay and lesbian people?” That might actually mean something for the present. It might actually cause a few people to think, “What minorities are we oppressing right now that we will later have to apologize for?” I’m sure, some later queen will make an announcement that locking up all those drug addicts was wrong. Of course, it won’t matter then. They’ll be off to throwing people in prison for different stupid reasons.
As a society, we are always fond of being accepting of useful weirdos. I wrote about this recently, Unstable Weirdos and Business Success. A business consultant was trying to figure out how companies could keep the good (usable) parts of us weirdos and get rid of the bad (nonusable) parts of us. The fact is that you can’t. If there is a brilliant man who seems perfectly at home in his work environment, it is pure luck. Most of us don’t have that luck and so society misses out on all of the nice things we could add because it’s uncomfortable to have us awkward people around.
Of course, there are places for people like me: academia. But even it has its limits. And look at the way that conservatives think about academia: it’s that place where “dangerous” ideas come from. And even liberals want to turn it into nothing but a training ground for the brave new world of employment opportunities. In other words: the conservatives want the colleges to produce the same old cogs and the liberals want the colleges to produce new and improved cogs. But they are all cogs. And unfortunately for me, I am not a cog. And unfortunately for the society, many, many more brilliant people than I am are not cogs.
Of course, Turing wasn’t a difficult guy to work with. He just had this one small problem: he wasn’t sexually attracted to the “right” sex. It just shows how small minded people are about social deviance. Some day they may throw people in jail for not liking football. Unimaginable, you think? There was a time when some people drank and other people smoked cannabis. Yet almost a million people are arrested for cannabis every year in the Land of the Free. (Irony alert!) And the vast majority of those arrests were for simple possession. So if in a hundred years, I get a posthumous pardon after I died in jail for the crime of thinking that football is the most boring game ever invented, don’t be surprised. Well, be a little surprised. I think pretty highly of myself. But I’m no Alan Turing!