Church of the Saviour Drug Store

Welcome to the architectural tour of beautiful uptown Northeasterville, aka the Dry Capital of the World. It's a small central Swingstate town with a rich history of churchgoing, education, enterprise, and opposition to demon alcohol. Right next to the public library on State Street, you'll see the Anti-Saloon League Museum, once the hub of a publishing empire that protected millions of people from unwholesome habits. Keep going north and you'll see the largest of several Methodist churches in town, a dramatic modern structure thrusting upward between spacious parking lots. Farther up State Street is the even larger campus of St. Paul Catholic Church, with its acres of parking where one of the town's original brick houses once stood in the way of progress.

Looking south on State Street, next to the post office and across from the majestic Episcopal Church, we find the Swingstate National Guard Armory, home of Regiment XXX and the local armed forces recruiting office, always looking to promise a free college education to the town's able-bodied cannon fodder. Up the street a block, I see the wrecking ball has spared the old fascade of the Church of the Saviour, which will soon become the home of the fastest-growing religious organization in Amerika, CVS Drugs. I can't wait to see how tastefully the rest of the CVS drug store is integrated with the pointed steeple and neo-classical porch of the old red brick church at State and Walnut. I'm sure it will be faithful to the nineteenth-century heartland tradition of making money in any way possible in the name of our heritage.

And the timing couldn't be more appropriate. While our elected representatives dismantle Social Security, cut Medicare and Medicaid, and make the world safe for the pharmaceutical industry, the rising tide that's supposed to lift all boats is a profitable flow of medicine to cure everything that's wrong with everybody. This is the new religion. Am I the last to notice? The drug company is watching out for our health, just like the military is defending us from foreign threats. It combines the modern belief in progress through technology with the patriotic trust that the leaders who make the laws and the captains of industry who lead them by the nose know better than you and I what's best for you and me. How fitting that instead of just tearing down the entire Church of the Saviour United Methodist, they decided to save the front so the brand new CVS blends in nicely with the streetscape of our safe, secure, home town.

Oh yeah, and kids, don't do drugs.