GIVE CLEESE A CHANCE!

Image By Paul Boxley - Originally posted to Flickr as John Cleese, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6717611

‘If you ever do want to kill yourself, but lack the courage, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick.’- John Cleese 

John Cleese gave Palmerston North a hard time during a visit here in 2006, calling Palmerston North the "suicide capital of the world". This made international headlines.

In defence of Cleese, Palmerston North has been compared to East Berlin during the Cold War and Alabama during the 1960s Civil Rights Protests by people who know the city well, at all levels. New Zealand's most distinguished writer, shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature, moved to Palmerston North from a nearby town in 1989, in ill health. In 1992, she faced an invasive, intrusive, distressing and unnecessary tax investigation in this town. 

Let's revert to Cleese as a global comic powerhouse, famous for exposing and lampooning political suppression.

In an interview with Lord Melvyn Bragg, on The South Bank Show, Cleese said that his ultimate aim was to break through all social barriers and to communicate with all people in a direct, Christ-like manner.  

My appeal to Give Cleese a Chance, relates to his comments to Esquire magazine, when Cleese first became famous in the USA: "The great shock for a small town guy like me, is in hitting the real world, and being made to realize that the people in charge are much less smart, less altruistic, less humane, than one had been brought up to believe. It's a shock I think I'm still recovering from ....Humour has been my way of dealing with that shock."

To Give Cleese a Chance, let the people of Palmerston North dwell more on what Cleese says above, and what he has said to Lord Melvyn Bragg. Let's appoint John Cleese Ambassador-at- Large for Palmerston North, to show that this is one place where the people in charge- and all of the people here- are indeed smart, are indeed altruistic, and are indeed humane. Let's make our community-spirit exportable!