If you were King of the Forest, the animals still wouldn’t listen to you. They’ve all pretty much got their own agenda, and Hail to the King isn’t a huge priority.

If there’s one standout feature of life, it’s that there’s no shortage of people. They are everywhere, in all shapes and sizes, and with all sorts of things on their mind. Most of them are delightful and very good company, well worth knowing. There are those few, however, who are either cruel, selfish or just plain irritating. Luckily there are few of them and a ton of the more enjoyable types so you’re not missing out on anything if you avoid these people:

Someone who has many amusing stories that all seem to end with the phrase: “So I took out my gun and shot him!,” followed by a big belly laugh.

People who want to discuss their pets constantly and insist you agree their animal is “almost human.” No, no it is not. But you are.

People who scan religious texts for out-of-context excerpts that justify their hatred and their nasty behavior. A pox be upon them.

Anyone who doesn’t like ice cream. What else is wrong with them?

People who insist that their oddball diet of choice is the only proper sustenance for everybody and only evil people disagree with them.

Thunder Thieves. There are those people who just cannot stand to let someone else shine, to have their moment of joy and feeling special. They interject themselves into someone else’s big moment to focus all attention back where they feel it properly belongs, on themselves and only them at all times forever no matter what. Another name for such petty and insecure souls is opera singers: me-me-me-me!

Exercise fanatics. To these people, there’s nothing worth doing that is not worth overdoing. Most of us would take the six pack over the six pack abs.

Experts on everything. Keep going, professor. I think I see someone in need of your vast intellectual prowess down the road a mile or so.

Frowners. That’s one hell of an odd choice for a permanent facial expression, and one most of us would rather not look at for very long.

Conspiracy Nuts. The biggest favor you can do for these people is to shun them. This way they’ll be certain there’s a nefarious plot against them, thus making their lives full and purposeful. It’s a win-win situation. You’ve spread some joy to someone and don’t have to listen to their convoluted nonsense.

Judges. Ever notice that judgmental people never judge anybody to be good in any way? No, the rest of us never just seem to measure up to their own personal perfection.

Advisors. We all seek advice from time to time from people who know us and who we trust. Then there is that breed of unsolicited advice-givers whose own lives are generally a mess and yet they feel they know what is best for everyone else. Other than for amusement, why would anyone listen to them?

Men who carry a change purse in their pocket. What the hell is that all about? Didn’t they ever read about Ebenezer Scrooge?

Gloom and doom types. To these people, the future hold nothing but disaster. If they won ten million bucks in the lottery they’d complain about the taxes they’d have to pay and how everybody would be after their dough. Vindicate them by making sure being in your company is not in their future.

Blamers. Blamers are never at fault for all the crazy things that happen to them. Like their Conspiracy Nut cousins, there’s always something or somebody to blame for their misfortunes. It’s never the person they see in the mirror every bleak morning and they will never admit that the whole world may have a point and they just might have a little bit of a flawed attitude.

Dismissers. When something hard or catastrophic happens to you, there are those among us who say it is no big deal, that their experiences have been far worse. Cancer, shmancer! I have suffered worse. So what if someone you love died? I get migraines! Not the best people with which to commiserate.

Bad News Bearers. Some people just love to put a damper on everyone else’s joy, usually waiting until someone is feeling pretty good before dropping some horrible piece of information from their vast inventory of disturbing and negative tidings. Killjoys live for wiping the smiles off other faces to match their own grim mugs. Give them some bad news: You’ve seen the last of me.

Revisionists. These are people who feel that their own painful past can be rewritten in memory, even trying to convince people who were there at the time that their behavior was completely admirable and proper. They insist long and loud even though everybody else remembers vividly how badly they screwed up and how rotten they acted. Admitting a mistake would be like cutting off a limb to these people, so instead they alienate everybody close to them with their lies and self-deception.

Voices of God. While many of us believe in God and practice one sort or religion or another, few of us pretend to speak for the Creator. Those who do always seem to interpret God’s words in a way that agrees wholeheartedly with their own mindset and personal opinions. How convenient. And when you’re God’s mouthpiece, then anything you do is automatically okay, like that whole multiple subservient wives deal and getting rich on other people’s money. How very convenient!

War Mongers. Doesn’t it seem that the least war-mongering people are soldiers, the people who actually have to fight the wars that others love to start from the comfort of safe surroundings? Soldiers sign up to defend and protect their nation and have their hands plenty full with that demanding duty. They don’t need the people who they serve using them as expendable pawns every time their nation disagrees with another nation. War is hell on earth, but only for those in harm’s way. For some, it is a parlor game for monetary gain and a casually vicious enterprise. Wonder how casual they’d be if the viscousness, the stench of death and horrid bloody injuries were part of their everyday lives, if those who call for warfare at the drop of a hat actually had to participate in one? Before boot camp was over Pacifism would catch on in a hurry. Who knows, humanity might even get the hang of tolerance, good will and diplomacy. Until then, shun the war mongers, those cowards and bullies by proxy. You want to be a bully, do it in person or shut the hell up. Faced with the prospect of facing real danger, all bullies change their tune swiftly.

Being drunk is no excuse for doing stupid shit. Lots of people get drunk and behave just fine. If you’re an idiot, that’s not Jack Daniels’ fault.

So we’re trying to create democracies now in places that have never experienced getting to choose their own leaders. That’s a dicey proposition. And on top of this, we’re trying it in places where tribal, regional, ethnic and religious loyalties are far more important than national unity. These places have been cobbled together as “nations” only because there were strong and brutal dictators around to enforce national unity. Anybody remember Yugoslavia? That was another psuedo-nation created by imperialist powers following World War 2 and it lasted only as long as its dictator did. 

Field Marshall Josip Broz Tito was a real live rootin’-tootin’ brutal dictator who knew full well he was presiding over disparate nationalities and held Yugoslavia together by the force of sheer terror. After he finally dropped dead at the ripe old age of 87, Yugoslavia instantly reverted to the ancient pastime of all the Balkan States: earnestly killing one another for the pure joy of it. These days Yugoslavia is several nations, all hating their neighbors and laying claim to some portion of their territory. Map-makers at Rand-McNally are on constant alert for the formation of new nations in that region, their border erasers ever at the ready.

Most Balkan nations, by the way, are democracies, at least nominally. The electorates there, however, haven’t yet gotten the hang of living with the fact that sometimes your candidate loses the election. When that happens in a democracy, that is not the signal to carve out another small nation or to start yet another ethnic cleansing genocide campaign. Unless of course you’re a Balkan nation, where many centuries of murderous tradition trumps civilized living every time. The winners of the elections don’t really get the concept either and usually start oppressing their nation’s minorities and jailing the political opposition as soon as they take office. But, they are Balkan nations, and that is what they do. Babies cry, dogs bark and Balkan people slaughter one another and there’s nothing any of us can do to change these facts of life.

So that leaves us with our grand experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan, two places with no history at all of choosing their own leaders, and in Iraq, their history is where history began. Civilization as we know it started there, and since we began writing down what men have done there hasn’t ever been any sort of election there. Kings, emperors, dictators and conquerors have always ruled that region by force of arms. That’s a huge problem, to get people to rethink 5,000 years of a way of life. And the way we went about introducing the joys of democracy to these people is petty problematic too. 

We invaded their nation without provocation, destroyed and disbanded their armies, blew up a ton of their infrastructure, killed hundreds if thousands of their people and hung their leader. And now we’re telling them to be like us? Not a whole lot there to recommend itself to emulation. How can these people tell the difference between America and Alexander, Darius or any other of “The Greats” who have arrived with slaughtering, conquering armies? To them we’re just the latest dangerous horde coming to impose our will and sack a helpless nation. When we leave it will be a huge relief to the the locals who will then most likely go back to being ruled by some other tyrant who will erect many statues of himself and amuse himself by terrorizing his own people and imprisoning and executing anyone brazen enough to oppose his autocratic rule. 

And then things will feel right again to most Iraqis. They know what we do not; that anyone they elect will be somebody that a significant portion of the population hates because he is not of their particular tribe and does not follow their version of Islam, and as such is eligible only for being murdered in his bed with his entire family. That was also true of the kings and dictators that have ruled them over the millennia but those guys gave the opposition no options at all when it comes to having a say in how the government operates and who gets to kill who. Which sort of suits the people there, who will be content to grumble amongst themselves about the government. Then the dictator will die or be killed and another one will take his place, just as it has been for 5,000 years.

And then there’s Afghanistan, a.k.a. Illiteracy Central. Less a nation than a collection of tribal areas run by warlords, this country is even less likely to embrace democracy any time soon than a pride of lions is to elect their next alpha male. Democracy, more than anything else, requires the consent of the people. Look at our last President, Bush The Younger, who was hated by so many for his incompetence, his corruption and for invading the wrong country, of all things, and yet there was absolutely no movement in this country to overthrow our lawful government. In a democracy, when you make a mistake and elect a complete idiot, you ride it out as best you can and then elect someone else to clean up their mess, like America just did. 

That method is far preferable to periodic civil war over who gets to run things, but again, that requires the consent of the people. In general, democracies are full of educated people. That’s not the case in Afghanistan. In recent attacks, Taliban insurgents have been blowing up schools that had the gall to educate girls, a no-no for those cavemen. God forbid they got an education and became interesting people who would see right through the Taliban’s misogynistic fear of women. These Taliban were the latest dictators in Afghanistan, a group of cretins so dense and backward that not only do they oppose education, they seek to ban music, dancing, movies and anything else there is to smile about in that desolate backwater. 

The puppet democracy installed by America is failing. Meanwhile, the only reason America had to be there, finding Osama bin Laden, is on the back burner while we distract ourselves by trying to instill democracy in a very undemocratic society. This is another place once conquered by Alexander The Great, of the Balkan state of Macedonia, not incidentally, and another place where he made no difference at all in their lives or attitudes when he left. And their way of life and their attitudes haven’t changed all that much since his brutal visit in 321 B.C.

Outside of enthusiastically embracing the cool weapons the West has supplied them with in order to kill whoever opposes them or even thinks about it, the Afghani tribal warlords and the people that they rule absolutely have no use for democracy or any notions of an equitable, tolerant and peaceful society. And just as in Iraq, we are not exactly providing them with any sort of stellar model of a utopian society when the first contact they have with us in on the business end of a gun barrel. The military exists not for winning hearts and minds, but for annihilating them. They are not exactly the Peace Corps. So to expect these two nations to embrace democracy is wishful thinking. Democracies always spring up when the people of a nation insist upon it and get rid of their tyrants. And once having done so, they commit themselves to putting up with their lawfully elected leaders for the length of their term in office, whether or not they voted for them. 

America should just stop kidding ourselves that it can be otherwise and leave these places to their misery until they wake up and smell the coffee. Only at that point can we assist these nations if they want our help, and after what we have done to them, it’s pretty understandable if they don’t seek our counsel. Let’s just kill or capture bin Laden and bring our troops home. Seven years in Afghanistan is far too harsh of a sentence for our soldiers, who didn’t do anything to deserve it. We went to war there only because they were giving safe haven to our mortal enemies, not to redesign their government or change their way of thinking. That’s got to come from within. It’s none of our business how long that takes so long as they are not attacking us.

Popcorn smells so much better than it tastes.

Now that the war on science is over, maybe our scientists can get busy doing useful things again. For eight years under the Bush The Younger Administration, science was considered some sort of anti-religious voodoo. Our nation’s scientists had to be content with narrating shows on cable TV about black holes and biographies of dead scientists who actually accomplished something. It was a nice racket, but it has sort of dulled their intellectual edge. Our space program is dying on the vine too, with the latest attempt to send yet another piece of space junk into orbit landing in the Arctic Ocean. Our space shuttles are starting to become a collection of old, beat-up cargo trucks, accidents waiting to happen.

The only diseases that have been cured are the phony ones some scientists have been inventing while in the employ of giant drug companies who then market expensive placebos to treat them. That whole Attention Deficit scam is nothing more than a world full of people bored to tears with our paltry scientific output in recent years. Who wants to listen to people with expensive educations babbling about some wonder drug that still doesn’t make anything they say worth our time? That attention deficit will in force remain until they come up with something worthwhile. Some suggestions:

CLOSE THE NUTRITION/ENJOYMENT GAP. It seems that everything that is bad for you tastes great while anything good for you tastes like crap. No matter how you slice it, shape it or package it, tofu is horrible and unsatisfying. What the hell is it, anyway? It’s not even similar to food. Why not get to work on potato chips that are nutritious without tasting like fried cardboard? How about a wholesome food that tastes like Peeps? The kids would clean their plates at every meal. And stop trying to get us to stop enjoying steak. It’s not going to happen. We’re carnivores and predators by nature and don’t give a rat’s ass who disapproves. If we were meant to eat bean sprouts, the damned things would taste like something.

STOP WITH THE CRAZY WEAPONS. Who’s side are the scientists on?  They have provided the world’s military organizations with enough firepower to kill us all several times, from poison gasses to nuclear warheads and now unmanned predator airplanes that can find you and kill you along with anybody in the immediate vicinity without anybody getting so much as mud on their boots. While all these things are pretty impressive from a pure technological standpoint, where’s the benefit to mankind? If the scientists don’t cooperate with the military, none of these things get manufactured. How about conducting a war on cancer or diabetes? If we deploy half the resources and energy that we bring to bear in the taking of lives, maybe we could save a few. Maybe the scientists could sleep a little better too.

LOSE THE “JUST BECAUSE WE CAN” MENTALITY.  Most of us are capable of doing any number of crazy things but we don’t. Just because one is capable of something, that doesn’t mean that it must be done. Who wants cloned humans? We’ve got a ton of people already and we let 36,000 of them die every single day from the torture of starvation. How much regard will we have for the lives of people we create in laboratories? And knowing scientists, they’ll clone themselves, and then we’ll have two or three of each of these annoying social misfits on our hands. Then what? People will start reaching for some of those high-tech weapons to thin the herd of these pompous and tedious creeps, that’s what. And if they feel they must clone somebody, how about cloning some strippers? Everybody likes them.

LEARN TO SPEAK. Scientists like to speak in shop talk, then get all condescending like we’re all morons because we don’t understand them. We would understand them just fine if they lose their pomposity and speak like regular people, which is what they are, white coats or no white coats. Somewhere during their many years of schooling, they need to take a course or two in speaking intelligibly. The temptation of many professionals is to assume that the basics of their specialized fields is common knowledge, but most people get over it and learn to communicate with other people. People can understand just about anything when it is explained by a person skilled not only in molecular biology, but in talking. Which, by the way, is a skill most of master quite early in life. Maybe some of these people could do a study on why scientists have been unable to grasp this most basic of human concepts when they are capable of unraveling DNA codes. It could be that their own DNA code is missing something somewhere. Odds are, though, that none of them will go near that one with a 10-foot test tube.

Let the little things go, but for what’s important, take a stand. Have the balls you were born with or risk losing them. Fight evil and injustice.

The government of Pakistan says that American strikes against Al Qaeda in Pakistan have greatly reduced that terror gang’s global reach but heightened their threat to Pakistan. Their point being? If Al Qaeda wasn’t in Pakistan in the first place there would be no American attacks within their border. And speaking of borders and Pakistani territory, their government has ceded huge chunks of their own nation to warlords and Taliban terrorists. And so America takes it upon itself to kill as many Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters as they can so they can’t plan more devastating attacks on The United States and other Western nations. Whether that’s right or wrong, that’s the reality and a policy that will continue as long as America’s enemies are allowed to hide there. The government of Pakistan just doesn’t get it.

So the Governor of Louisiana complains that the President’s budget has 130 million dollars set aside for monitoring volcanos. Aren’t volcanos things you should sort of keep an eye on? Doesn’t seem like enough when you think about the potential damage volcanos can do. Maybe he figures that this administration should ignore volcanos like the last administration ignored the inadequate levees in his home state. How did that work out for New Orleans? This Governor Bobby Jindal guy has his head buried as far up his ass as the Bush the Younger administration did. He also tried to make a grandstand issue of the bailout billions being handed to his state by President Obama and the Democratic Congress, saying he would refuse “some of the money” because it violated his Republican free-market anti-Big Government philosophy. 

Well, his version of some of the money was less than 1% of the total of $3.7 billion earmarked for Louisiana, eagerly glomming the other 99 and a half percent of the dough. And the portion he tried to refuse? That would be for extended unemployment insurance for his state’s hard-hit workers, people who  tend to vote. Being the governor of a state, he is allowed to accept or reject the money. The way the law is written, however, he would either have to accept every penny or reject the whole package. He can always make that choice if he’s so sure of his principles, the same ideas and policies that held sway in America for eight years and got us into this horrendous mess. Odds are he’ll take the money and not shut up, but at least the people of his state will benefit from the recovery plan even if their governor doesn’t get it.

Also not getting it is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a multi-billionaire who bought his office twice and had the law changed so he can try to buy it a third time. Now, there’s nothing wrong with his being a billionaire, he earned his money and earned it clean. He didn’t make his dough by cheating or on the back of underpaid workers. And when he’s done with politics he wants to get into philanthropy and give most of his money away. So there’s a lot to recommend the guy as a decent man. He just happens to be a clueless mayor. When he’s not tripling the price of parking tickets and other civil fines to create a shadow tax on the working classes, he’s trying to put tolls on the East River bridges, ancient and incredibly busy structures emptying into crowded streets with absolutely no space for toll plazas. The traffic jams this would create would make the already legendary Manhattan traffic jams unbearable. 

He also tried to nickel and dime police recruits several years ago, paying new cops Wal-mart wages. When reminded that he was asking for a corrupt police force, that the best candidates will seek jobs elsewhere, he scoffed, citing fiscal responsibility. Well, a couple of years later the Police Department was rocked by scandals when these bottom-of-the-barrel recruits started moonlighting in their own serious crime careers as well as being corrupt cops. The City Council stepped in and raised police salaries so they could once again hire better people for the job, but not before a lot of harm was done and innocent people killed. There’s a reason for paying the police well, and teachers too. We want to attract the best possible people to those critical jobs, honest and dedicated individuals who are worth their decent pay. Michael Bloomberg had to blunder his way into scandals and consistent sub-par performance before he found out that cheapness is it’s own reward. When it comes to politics, he’s a good businessman, but a lousy mayor who just doesn’t get it. Some people never do.

Attaining perfection would be a real drag. We would have nothing to shoot for, and be afraid to do anything at all for fear that we might mess things up.

Okay, we got it! The sky is falling. Life as we know it is over. We’re all going to Hell in a hand basket. It’s getting to be a real pain in the ass to read the news lately. One dire prediction after another, bankers begging like bums for more billions, company after company laying off workers and internet geeks crying they can’t get start-up millions for their latest annoying internet idea that the world just cannot do without. One insane Congresswoman even lamented that we are running out of (!) rich people, the ignorant bimbo. Woe is us and shit…   

While things are pretty bad and a lot of ordinary people are taking major financial hits they cannot afford, well, it it really all that bad? The day after the Academy Awards broadcast, that annual overblown expression of love by Hollywood for itself, you have all sorts of serious news outlets dedicating reams of copy reacting to the show, good, bad and indifferent. How bad can things be when serious people still have time to critique the Oscars? It’s always a good sign when people pursue the frivolous. That means there’s still more to life than the grim business of hunting and gathering. And what’s more frivolous than the Academy Awards? 

Thirty six million American households watched the damned thing, with who-knows-how-many people per household riveted to their sets to see who gets the award for Best Performance In A Movie Everybody Hated and things of that sort. It’s been a while since a lot of people have actually seen the nominated movies, but none of that seems to matter. It’s still the same parade of the fabulous, the beautiful and the glamorous preening for each other and praising one another to the skies. And if they go a bit over the top, well, it’s the Oscars, isn’t it? What do we expect from Hollywood, restraint? 

And in truth, the auditorium where the Oscars are held is a room full of breathtakingly talented people, not only the actors, directors and writers, but the rest of the people who’s job it is to produce these films, edit them to make the narrative flow seamlessly, operate the cameras, make them sound authentic, light them properly, make the costumes and add all kinds of special effects. And if they get a whole lot carried away with themselves once a year, so what? Who would watch it if they didn’t? Who would care if they showed up in regular clothes and didn’t sing and dance and joke around? They are entertainers, as valuable a national resource as gold, and a hell of a lot more valuable than the miserable failures running our financial institutions.

Pretty much anybody can ruin a giant corporation through greed, corruption and incompetence. Hell, most of us could do it for half of the annual $20 million or so the giant corporations pay their CEOs. But not many people can do what our artists do, and they have not failed us like our corporate princes. Year in and year out, in good times and bad, America’s artists produce an astounding array of great performances, and not only in the movies. Our musicians are still the trend-setters of the music world, writing and performing the soundtracks to our lives. Our comedians punch holes in our assumptions with hilarious precision and get us to think about things in a different way. Our visual artists are painting and sculpting their unique personal visions regardless of what the Dow Jones index says.

And it’s not only our famous artists who give us these gifts. Visit any off-Broadway or regional theater where struggling actors are toiling for peanuts and you’ll see incredible talent on display, as moving and insightful as the big stars. Go to any nightclub featuring live music and listen to some of the musicians few people have heard of and you’ll come away wondering why these brilliant people are not famous. Go to any small art gallery and see the paintings and sculptures of unknown artists; brilliant, beautiful and challenging. 

None of these talented artists decides to become an artist. That would be insane and something that can’t be done. You don’t become a great artist because you want to. No, the art picks them, not the other way around. They have no choice but to pursue their visions and share the results with the rest of us. We might want to do what they do, but the truth is, we cannot. It is very difficult and demanding and a rare gift. But we can appreciate the incredible gifts our artists give to us, and how very rich they make our lives. Who among us cannot recite the lines to his favorite movie verbatim, sing along to a thousand great songs, conjure up mental images of their favorite paintings or remember every line of a great poem? All these things have been created for us to enjoy.

None of these pieces of art were created by bankers and accountants. None of them affect the economy one way or another. None of them will feed your family or pay your bills. No piece of art will cure a disease or usher in any scientific breakthroughs. But without our artists, we’d all be poorer than poor, we’d be spiritually bankrupt and adrift in a bleak landscape. So let the Hollywood people celebrate themselves. And why not? These artists know they are the lucky few, the ones who get to be rich and famous. They’d be doing what they do anyway, just like the vast majority of artists and performers everywhere, toiling not for the sake of money or recognition, but for the sake of the art; the music, the acting, the painting, the writing, the sculpture, the photography. They are artists and they have no choice, they must create and they must give. That’s the nature of the beast. Let’s hope things don’t ever get so bad that the rest of us don’t notice. Hurray for Hollywood!