A thought-provoking email from a reader: [Quoting me, comparing the British and American civil wars a day or two ago] “However, it is interesting to note that some similar schema has been applied to the American Civil War in the popular imagination. “Sure, slavery was wrong and all that, but… how romantic those Southerners were! Compared to the dull plodding Union cannon-fodder…” [My reader then continues] It is the Romance of the Doomed and it transcends history and politics and all the particulars. It is the impulse that makes “Romeo and Juliet” or “Tristan and Isolde” more compelling love stories with happy endings. It is why the Romans boasted that they were the remnant of burnt Troy, not victorious Sparta, why a name like “Hector” survived into the 21st century, handed down in families where no one has actually *read* Homer in at least a thousand years, whereas “Achilles” has all-but disappeared.

To hear some Brits talk about Rommel, you’d think that only the utter depravity of the Holocaust has prevented some such feeling from arising about Germany. Even Yanks, who as far as I can never had a “favorite enemy General of the war” contest, grudgingly admit that the Germans had much cooler uniforms, weapons and tanks than anything we ever had.

The naive reverence for all forms of early death – teen suicide, 19th century consumptives, even that mysterious Hollywood Disease whose only discernable symptom is that the patient gets better looking in the last reel (see, “Love Story” among others) are all examples of the same impulse.

Just something about the way the (usually adolescent) brain is wired, I suppose. Genuine grown-ups are too practical to romanticize failure, even the noble ones, much less the ones that obviously weren’t.

Regards, [Name] [Derb] Not all us grown-ups attain that level of “practicality,” but there’s a point there none the less.