Ah, my first diary…
Patrick Murphy has defeated incumbent Allen West in Florida. A number of times. But despite math and logic and all that other pesky nonsense, Allen West continues to contest and refuse to concede.
This has caused a few people to make the humorous comparison between the Murphy-West contention and the classic scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where King Arthur (Graham Chapman) battles the Black Knight (John Cleese) to cross a bridge. Arthur handily defeats his enemy by chopping off his arm. Hey, that decided it, right? But no, his opponent keeps refusing to give up despite getting his, uh, arm handed to him ("Just a flesh wound"), and Arthur proceeds to whack off the rest of the knight's limbs, finally leaving him a stump. A stump that still thinks it's winning: "Oh, I see. Running away, eh? You yellowbellied bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you! I'll bite your legs off!"
Yes, comedy. But what strikes me as a far better look in Allen West's mindset in this continual and infantile fit of sore losing in Florida is John Cleese's explanation of what inspired the famous Black Knight scene. Here's Cleese on the commentary track for the Monty Python and the Holy Grail DVD:
I got the idea for this, we wrote this, [Graham] Chapman and I together, from a story that had been told me when I was in Jumper Gee's English class at Clifton College in about 1957, and he told me about two Roman wrestlers who had been engaged in a long wrestle. And they got so entangled that one of them had a broken limb and was in such pain that he submitted, and various attendants and seconds came forward and sort of disentangled them and tapped the winner on the shoulder and said "you've won"—and discovered that he was dead. I think that's the first posthumous victory I'd ever heard of. But it caused dear Jumper Gee to tell me that if you didn't give in you couldn't possible lose—which I've always thought was philosophically unsound. It was the basis for this particular piece of writing.
Maybe Allen West took a similar English course from a similar English professor? Or maybe Allen West has always been, as he's proven over and over, "philosophically unsound."
Or, as Chapman's King Arthur said: "You're a loony."
(Pardon if I mis-transcribed the name "Jumper Gee" from the audio.)
Update: Allen West concedes. And there was much rejoicing. (Hooray)
