Cold City/Downtown/Fri Dec 2/12:33 am: Officer B. P. Lisle reports: "I was dispatched to investigate a report of a naked male standing in the roadway while it was freezing. I arrived and found the victim standing in the roadway with his clothes in a pile at his feet. I called SPD, they arrived, cleaned the victim, and transported him to HMC for an involuntary committal." The significant detail in this short "mental" report is this: "A naked male standing in the roadway while it was freezing."

Those who have read Michel Foucault's first book, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, will recall this extraordinary passage, which is near the start of the third chapter: "[At the end of the 17th century, doctors] would always admire 'the constancy and ease with which certain of the insane of both sexes bear the most rigorous and prolonged cold... On certain days when the thermometer indicated 10, 11, and many as 16 degrees below freezing, a madman in the hospital of Bicetre could not endure his wool blanket, and remained sitting on the icy floor of his cell. In the morning, one no sooner opened his door than he ran in his shirt into the inner court, taking ice and snow by the fistful, applying it to his breast and letting it melt with a sort of delectation.' Madness, insofar as it partook of the animal ferocity, preserved man from the dangers of diseases; it afforded him an invulnerability, similar to that which nature, in its foresight, had provided for animals."

Though medical science has long abandoned the belief that the "density [the insane] borrow from the blind world of the beasts, inured [them] to hunger, heat, cold, pain," it still has currency in our everyday world. Certainly, most of the motorists who saw the naked madman standing on the roadway at the edge of downtown were, like the 17th- and early 18th-century doctors, impressed by his ability to endure freezing temperatures. A normal person could not do it; he could not take off his clothes and bear such weather—within an hour he would be dead stiff like the poor girl in Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale, The Little Match Girl. ("...In the dawn of morning there lay the poor little one, with pale cheeks and smiling mouth, leaning against the wall; she had been frozen to death on the last evening of the year...")

The one major difference between the madmen of the "Age of Reason" and the madmen of now (the Age of Neoliberalism) is that back then they were hospitalized, kept inside of institutions that managed their broken lives. Whereas today, because of Ronald Reagan's hardhearted policies toward the mentally ill and poor, madmen live on the cold streets of very cold cities.