If there is a beginning of the end of our world as feature film, an acceleration of the apocalyptic narrative (Oh my god, this is it -- we are finally coming unhinged!), it might be last week's large-scale protests outside our province's bigger general hospitals. Though I knew at once the motivation behind these protests, it wasn't until a beat later that I considered how those inside these hospitals might be affected by the inconsideration of the protesters. That protesters were treating hospitals not as places of quiet, sometimes palliative care, but as government administrative centres, is wholly Foucauldian.
How might Michel Foucault have felt as he lay in a Paris hospital in 1984 if he knew that those outside were protesting against a mandatory vaccination that might save them from the virus he was dying of? Surely he would understand -- and perhaps take some ironic pride in -- how the public have come to see hospitals not as places where one goes to get better but as institutions tasked with hiding that which is socially deviant. Foucault died before North America began to close down its "madhouses" -- not because they are "inhuman," as U.S. President Reagan infamously claimed, but because the State (federal government) was tired of supporting them.
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