Vox’s posts tagged loyalty

Faithful Friends...

nobody@vox.com(Barley) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:13:33 +0000

I seriously cried for 10 minutes when I read the story of Hachikō... damn you, Ryo, it was too heartwarming.

Courtesy of wikipedia:

In 1924, Hachikō was brought to Tokyo by his owner, Hidesamurō Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo. During his owner's life, Hachikō saw him off from the front door and greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. The pair continued their daily routine until May 1925, when Professor Ueno didn't return on the usual train one evening. The professor had suffered a stroke at the university that day. He died and never returned to the train station where his friend was waiting.

Hachikō was given away after his master's death, but he routinely escaped, showing up again and again at his old home. After time, Hachikō apparently realized that Professor Ueno no longer lived at the house. So he went to look for his master at the train station where he had accompanied him so many times before. Each day, Hachikō waited for Professor Ueno to return. And each day he didn't see his friend among the commuters at the station.

The permanent fixture at the train station that was Hachikō attracted the attention of other commuters. Many of the people who frequented the Shibuya train station had seen Hachikō and Professor Ueno together each day. Realizing that Hachikō waited in vigil for his dead master, their hearts were touched. They brought Hachikō treats and food to nourish him during his wait.

This continued for 10 years, with Hachikō appearing only in the evening time, precisely when the train was due at the station.

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...So cute and sweet. He must have been so lonely and sad and confused... I think these loyal dog stories just get to me really bad because I got like this when I read this other story from One Piece (I know! a manga of all things!) about a dog waiting for his master to return to a pet store but his master got sick and died far away. And the dog stood guard over it despite terrible odds and almost died defending it. The shop was burned and the hero of the series managed only to save one box of pet food to commemorate the store. Lame that Hachiko is being made into a movie with Richard Gere though... Still, tons of sad dog stories, all heartwarming. Like Beddgerlet's Gerlet (1800's, Welsh), or Greyfriars Bobby (1856-1872), or Heidi a terrier that climbed down a 500 foot vertical drop to get to the body of her owner (after he fell to his death while hiking) and stood guard over his body for days in 2001...You don't even NEED to be a super-dog. Think of Marley from the book Marley and Me... a neurotic dog with insane tendencies but nevertheless so winning that I cried through the book. Deserving, I think, of the famous Eulogy on the Dog...

(Of course, I know dogs are dogs and can't be treated as humans; sometimes I think dressing them in impractical accessories is somewhat demeaning and I definitely don't think dogs should be bred to be tiny and sickly and have such short lives lived out in purses, and I am very aware of awful things like puppy mills or other sorts of abusive treatment....I'm not for completely pampering dogs, I am simply for treating them with love and some reciprocated loyalty.)

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George Graham Vest, who died as the last living Confederate State Senator, took a case tried on September 23, 1870 in which he represented a client whose hunting dog, a foxhound named Old Drum, had been killed by a sheep farmer. The farmer had previously announced his intentions to kill any dog found on his property; the dog's owner was suing for damages in the amount of $150, the maximum allowed by law.

During the trial, Vest stated that he would "win the case or apologize to every dog in Missouri." Vest's closing argument to the jury made no reference to any of the testimony offered during the trial, and instead offered a eulogy of sorts. Vest's "Eulogy on the Dog" is one of the most enduring passages of purple prose in American courtroom history (only a partial transcript has survived):

“

Gentlemen of the jury: The best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has, he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it the most. A man’s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads. The one absolutely unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him and the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous is his dog.

Gentleman of the jury: A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer, he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounters with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens.

If fortune drives the master forth an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him to guard against danger, to fight against his enemies, and when the last scene of all comes, and death takes the master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by his graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, his eyes sad but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even to death.

”

Vest won the case and also won its appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court. A statue of the dog stands in front of the Warrensburg, Missouri courthouse.

I love wiki and I love dogs more.

Otis

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I like the way pumpkins smell

nobody@vox.com(Robot Cupcakes) — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:32:25 +0000

"No one will ever love you honestly,
No one will ever love you for your honesty."

The only two things I'm good at are my complete loyalty, and telling it like it is (unless I think someone is sensitive.)
So if that's true, I'm fucked. And I'm smiling because it's kind of funny. I hate to sound sentimental, but I think if anyone was going to love me for being just as fucking wicked crazy as I am, it will be Scott. We grew up together, so I don't think he could suddenly start disliking the things I do, and he never complains. He even thought it was funny when I was so furiously angry with him that I threw all his clothes out of the closet and snatched them out of his hands when he tried to put them back on hangers. I'm pretty set.

Honesty

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Loyalty

nobody@vox.com(ErinGoBragh) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:28:28 +0000

He got a tattoo finally, he tells me. I already know, but I wanna see. With a grin, he lift his t-shirt up over his bare chest.

And there it is: Los Angeles, written in ghetto-script over his heart. Very East L.A. Very Cali-style tattoo. Unexpected, but not shocking just the same.

It's so Jon. He laughs at my response, and lowers his shirt to reach for his rum and Coke. That's Jon, alright. A California purist; L.A. loyalist. A Hollywood influenced, beach bumming, cigarette-sucking, high-rollin', Burbank movie-star partier intellectual who's up to no good but too smart to get in trouble.

It's a Friday night, and we're hanging out around the pool, drinking and smoking and eating frozen pizza. Someone has a hooka, and it smells like bananas. Jon's chest is raw and bright red. Every night is a party at this house, and I wonder how Chris gets anything done living with him. I wonder how Jon stands Fresno. In the years I've known him, I've lost count of the weekend calls he's made to friends to relay about the party he was at, or how broke he is now, or how many Hollywood high-ups his dad had over for champagne and fillet mignon. Fresno offers him nothing but dirt, and he itches to graduate and get the hell out. I've watched him walk out the door at 2AM to drive home so that he could go surfing back in L.A. Even today, he is back in Hollywood, working as an editor.

Jon belongs in L.A. He wears his loyalty over his heart, etched onto his soul. I find myself envying him and his tattoo as I sip my rum and dangle my feet in the luke-warm pool. Tonight is a night for loyalty, it seems; Thomas is there, and Jon's bro, and all the boys. I know that I'll have to stay the night, and we'll probably go out for hangover breakfast in the morning. Good times.

I love Fresno, or the idea of Fresno. I value my ties to it. I will never be able to clear the dirt from my lungs. We are simpatico, me and the burdens of the Central Valley. She is my heritage, having raised me up with brown hands of peach fuzz and sweat.

I would never get Fresno tattooed over my heart. Fresnans never leave, but don't stay out of loyalty. They are taught to believe that there are no options. The only thing that brings me back is family and habit, and the longing for tree-fresh fruit. I believe there is a better place for me to flourish artistically, (though I've given L.A. a shot, and it certainly didn't make the cut.)

I may not be as hardcore as a Los Angeleno, but there is something there that creeps up to resemble fondness. I consider my loyalties, and I suppose that Fresno will always be home base. She's the home of my family, my first love, hard times, and high times. When I leave I miss her, and when I return, she makes me sigh. While Jon lives in The City of Angels, I live in the ash tree. I may fly from her dusty nest, but she is mi madre. I don't blame Jon for paying everlasting homage to his city.

Perhaps one day I will have a branch of peach blossoms reaching up my side, caught in a prefect state of coming to fruition.

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Don't mistake limited options for loyalty

nobody@vox.com(rogue) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:25:02 +0000

Why are you loyal to certain brands/stores? What keeps you coming back?
Sponsored by Microsoft Small Business.

Sometimes loyalty has nothing to do with repeat business. Sometimes one company simply has a monopoly and if legitimate competition existed, then people would not keep going back.

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Hachiko

nobody@vox.com(Sixbucksamonkey) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:35:21 +0000

Hachiko Waits

Leslea Newman

One of my favorite wastes of time, Mental_Floss has a feature today on 6 Utterly Loyal Dogs. Number one on the list is Hachiko. I was pretty sure I'd already posted about my love for his story before. Either I imagined that or I just tag so poorly that I cannot find it.

These are two juvenile books that I recommend. Hachiko waited at the Shibuya station every day for his master-- even after he had long-since died. fIt's a sad & beautiful story of loyalty (loyalty which some of you cat-persons out there consider to be a character flaw in dogs. I beg to disagree.) I wish I could have met Hachiko. I would have given him a hotdog. The sad thing about it is that after he died the vet said that it was probably the wooden skewers in the meat that passersby fed him that precipitated his death.

Here's a bit of film that more or less explains Hachiko's wait.

Hachiko: The True Story of a Loyal Dog (Bccb Blue Ribbon Picture Book Awards (Awards))

Pamela S. Turner

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More Things Fall Apart

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:10:48 +0000

Earth (A Deepa Mehta Film)

A few nights ago, I got to watch Deepa Mehta's film EARTH, the first in her EARTH, WATER, FIRE trilogy that provoked such a firestorm of protest in India. EARTH is about the unraveling of India upon the acquisition of Independence from the British in 1948. It looks at this period of great anguish and suffering through the eyes of one young girl (Lenny Baby) and a circle of her young adult caregivers. The film opens with Lenny Baby intentionally breaking a China dish, as though she senses the divisions to come and needs to symbolize them in some tangible way so that she can talk about her fears. Needless to say, no one really takes notice of the message she was trying to send, just as no one REALLY took time to think about the emotional and psychological stresses that a free India would bring to bear on its diverse populations.

India had always been a multi-cultural and multi-religious society. But it had always had some caste or some foreign power to regulate their co-existence. Political Independence demanded that whole new ways of thinking about one another be developed. Unfortunately, it led to the surfacing of deep and buried suspicians and animosities. Muslims, the minority, did not believe that they could trust a democratic and mostly Hindu India to protect its cultural distinctives. Sikhs and Parsees were forced to align themselves with one group or the other. It became too difficult to take the time needed to distinguish between one "sort" of Muslim or one "sort" of Hindu and another and individuals became identified as simply cells of the group, either enemy or friend.

“It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression.” Sigmund Freud

And EARTH looks at this one group of comrades, some Sikh, some Hindu, some Muslim, some Parsee and it looks at how the forces of the wider community eventually split them apart and set them to warring against each other. In the midst of them, Lenny Baby, a nine or ten year old girl who loves them all is also split apart. In one of the most poignant scenes, She takes a doll and rips it apart, as she herself is being torn apart. She is hopelessly doomed and in her childlike way, she knows it. She loves a Hindu. She loves a Muslim. She loves a Sikh. She speaks English. Her parents are Parsee. In a world where all these are killing each other in horrible ways she too will be forced to chose.

It raises important questions. Will we always resort in our loyalties to the communities were were born into? Can we create communities from the various "pre-loaded communities" and make them just as solid, just as enduring, just as formidable? And why can't we all see that really, we are most healthy when we feel free to belong to a number of communities that can overlap. Of course that makes life more complicated but, can we not manage it?

Have you ever done something symbolic, hoping that someone would see what you did and hear your cry for help in it?

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To Kill a King

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:27:23 +0000

To Kill a King

“not what they want but what is good for them.”
Remark by Oliver Cromwell.

Tonight's movie was To Kill a King. It is the story of the Roundhead's victory over the armies of King Charles in one of England's more interesting revolutions. It's about an inspired movement to dethrone a tyrant without having a clear plan for what sort of regime will replace it. It is about how even leaders of revolutions come to find out that their brothers-in-arms have different visions. And it is about how easily wealth can purchase power out from under idealism as long as there is a table to make deals under. I found myself asking "Am I watching a movie about King Chalres, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax, the Tower of London, and England? or am I watching a movie about Saddam Hussein, George Bush, Colin Powell, Guantanamo Bay, and Iraq?"

Soon after the Roundhead armies defeat the armies of the monarchists, King Charles goes about bribing parliament to vote to keep him in power. Oliver Cromwell wants to see him tried and beheaded. Lord Thomas Fairfax sees a more moderate approach to change in view, seeing only a need to get Charles to sign a new Constitution limiting his power. Unfortunately for him, he is caught in the middle. His family's privileges have their origins in the Monarchical system whereby families are rewarded with special treatment for serving and defending the crown. The inequalities that he enjoys are founded on a belief in the divine right of kings so ... how can he kill the king?

Eventually, he determines to kill his friend Cromwell instead. It is only King Charles who is not conflicted by second guesses in this portrayal of regime change and personal loyalty. Fairfax's loyalty to his wife, to his children, to his family, to tradition cannot take him on as long a leap as Oliver Cromwell takes. Cromwell seeks not a reformed old order but a completely reformatted new order.

... And yet, a few years into his new regime, Cromwell has to consider that the idea of a king might have its advantages. The following comes from an article by Patrick Little in History Today; Feb2007, Vol. 57 Issue 2, p24-31,

"If his highness can be moved to accept of it [the crown], the services he hath done the nations have abundantly deserved it; but if he who hath so much merited it do judge it fit to continue his refusal of it, the contempt of a crown -- which can not proceed but from an extraordinary virtue -- will render him, in the esteem of all whose opinion is to be valued, more honourable than any that wear it.

WHEN THE AMBASSADOR to France, Sir William Lockhart, wrote this in April 1657, it had been nearly two months since the first formal offer by Parliament to make Oliver Cromwell king, and in England people were waiting anxiously for the Lord Protector to make up his mind. Would he choose to become King Oliver or not?"

Ultimately, Cromwell went with his convictions and insisted that regardless of the pragmatics, it would be a sin to resurrect the idea of monarchy.

"Truly the providence of God has laid this title aside providentially … I would not seek to set up that that providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again."

His reference to rebuilding Jericho is from a passage in Joshua where God instructs that the city of Jericho, once razed, should never be rebuilt.

Again, the parallels to Iraq are interesting. Should Iraq have been completly deBaathified? should the Iraqi army have been dismissed entirely? How much change was possible in Iraq in such a short period of time? Should America have ever started using "Cromwellian methods" to achieve what may have been idealistic objectives?

“No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.”
Cromwell on personal fortunes.

Question for Comment: How are you affected when you feel that a cause you have dedicated yourself to has been taken over by someone who is using it for their own purposes?

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