What people have achieved a mythical status?

Why are you being obtuse, Finn? We can all make mistakes about English. It's a big big language. It could even be described as 'unreal' and you would grasp the nuance.

Wouldn't you? You know - "Beethoven", man he is so unreal"!

I'm not talking about myth in the smaller sense of the word. The music of Beethoven is so great that any image we have of him is merely an embodiment or personification of his music. If you saw the images of a two coins I posted you'll see how even the face of Beethoven has changed to match our idealization of him through his music.

Of course I realize that Beethoven had to have really existed because we have its music. But through his music he transcended himself. Somehow I don't think that way about any other composer despite the greatness of their music. Maybe that will change with time. I know that Shostakovich's 8th string quartet has been called "the soul of Russia".

A flattering coin doesn't a myth make.

Everyone in the world doesn't think of Beethoven as the apex of musical genius.

I don't mean to be argumentative, but you're pushing your premise too far with Ludwig. Arthur yes, JFK yes, Beethoven, no.

"Were said to have been . . . "

How would anyone have known? I'm sure local innkeepers and monks raked in the pennies on that one. That's not evidence of any kind, it's just hearsay--and pretty paltry hearsay at that. Since William Rufus had been murdered, or accidentally killed just the year before, I'm sure the first King Henry was glad for the distraction.

That is pure hogwash. Crockett was running for a third term in the House, and he announced to the voters in Tennessee that if they did not elect him, he would go to Texas, and they could go to Hell. They didn't elect him, and he wandered off to Arkansas a year later, where he rounded up some young men who thought they'd like to go to Texas with him and his band of Tennessee boys. To characterize his as one of the "people behind the rebellion" is silly. He just wandered into the situation, which is how he had conducted most of his adult life, when he wasn't actually in the House of Representatives, mis-representing the Tennessee electorate.

David Crockett was not Fess Parker in a Walt Disney movie, nor was he John Wayne playing the earnest revolutionary in a different movies. You should learn something about your subjects before your shoot your mouth off.

As is pretty much all American "history".

Okay, I'll bite. How is JFK a myth?

By the very definition.

His perceived achievements don't bear any resemblance to reality. The whole Camelot thing was American myth making in action.

True enough.

And that is absolutely no different than the entire American myth making in action that you believe in so strongly.

Your question is being answered.

This is myth only in the smallest, negative sense of the term.

This is accurate. JFK flubbed a few times, and we were lucky to avoid the messes he walked into.

Jacqueline Kennedy created the myth of Camelot with an inspired interview days after the assassination and by using her impeccable sense of style during the funeral. His reckless association with mobsters and their girlfriends and his brother's driven attack on those same people probably led to his death.

So, young, smart, charismatic? Yeah. Mythologized to hide his many shortcomings? Also yeah.

Sorry that you want to hold onto "coluber's definition of a myth," but it is a myth in every sense.

Assuming there was some ancient "Arthur" around who the Arthurian Myth was built, does the fact that he did nothing to match the Arthur we know make the myth "small and negative?"