Loyalty is what many St. Louisans feel - or at least have felt - towards hometown king Anheuser-Busch. No wonder some of us feel burned now that August Busch IV and the rest of the board favor selling to InBev.

Perhaps we should be more careful in the future to distinguish between loyalty as a genuine virtue and loyalty as a marketing device. Yet who can blame us for confusing the two? Blurring that line - getting us emotionally committed to a product - is what modern marketing is all about. And Anheuser-Busch is among the best marketers around.

Soaring eagles, clever frogs, gauzy shots of Clydesdales, cans of water for flood victims. It's enough to make you feel good about hoisting a cold Bud. Remember Gussie Busch's beer wagon circling Busch stadium to the tune of Hail to the King? Visitors found that strange, but many of us got downright teary-eyed.

So it's no surprise that loyalty was the first emotion many of us felt when InBev began courting A-B. Loyalty spurred calls for keeping the iconic red, white and blue Budweiser label in the St. Louis company's hands. Loyalists were the backbone of the websites and rallies that flourished while A-B publicly played at resisting a sale and privately negotiated the deal.

From the beginning, cooler heads saw that the outcome would hinge not on loyalty but on hard business facts: InBev's offer represents a huge financial boon to shareholders that A-B can't match. A-B has no built-in corporate defenses against a takeover. Even if A-B had managed to resist the takeover, its culture would have been forced to change drastically to survive.

So A-B loyalists, this Bud deal was not for you. Like it or not, that's just the way things work. If that makes us feel cynical, perhaps we should be more realistic about our corporate expectations. In the longrun, we may even decide that the system works to our collective advantage.

But let's remember that loyalty - the genuine virtue, not the marketing device - has real value, too. It holds communities together through hard times. It helps mobilize families and neighbors to support each other. With more than one cloud over the St. Louis economy, we need to put that kind of loyalty to good use. There's no point wasting it on a company.

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