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Entry: Good and Evil in Lviv, part I Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/good_and_evil_in_lviv#21523 Post contents: Great article, Matt. Good photos, too. Although I have reflected upon the evils of teetotalling, I've never much considered, myself, the significance of which *particular* alcohol a people drinks -- "The Reds also imported the scourge of vodka into a beer culture". How people live affects who they are -- and *what* they drink is intimately tied to how they live. A natural extension of the notions re/ "living deliberately" of the Agrarians & so on, but only obvious to me now that you pointed it out. We'd be better off in America if there were a moratorium on mixed drinks (excepting bloody Marys, Manhattans, and mint juleps, of course). I also especially like how you tied the Solzhenitsyn line (which Solzhenitsyn inherited from his intellectual ancestor Dostoevsky, if I'm not mistaken) into the bad Commie architecture. Without God anything is possible, which means those rare good things which do ensue will be blanketed over and hidden by the static of all the bad things which are now permitted. This applies even more aptly to secular capitalism as it does to socialism, as you noted. A complicated subject -- Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Catholics, Orthodox, and Soviets... I look forward to the next installment. Sent at: 2008 11 23