I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner Wayno, whose weekly blog post I highly recommend.

And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to my Sunday comic’s Secret Symbols.

Greetings Jazz Pickles. I hope your fermentation level over Thanksgiving was agreeable. 

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, from which the character “Scrooge” comes, is 181 years old this season. However you feel about the capitalist orgy that Christmas has become at the hands of modern culture, A Christmas Carol is still an uplifting story of how being a hateful asshole ruins no one’s life more than your own, and how, with a change of perspective, one can see that love, compassion, and goodwill make everyone’s life more enjoyable, starting with yours.

We’ve told the story 181 times and yet hateful assholes persist. Where do people like Scrooge come from? 

A few days ago, I got an email from a Bizarro reader who taunted me over the results of the U.S. presidential election. There was a time when I was insecure enough to respond, but these days, I routinely delete such jibes without much thought. Public figures—even fringe ones like me—deal with this kind of thing so often we develop callouses. 

Some people are born with an extra contemptibility gene, I suppose, but I think most assholes are created by their parents. Show me a bully, and I’ll show you a person raised by a bully.

People who lash out at others for sport are hurting inside. They’ve usually been the victims of cruelty and neglect from such an early age that they begin to believe they are worthless. With no innate sense of value, they often feel the only way to elevate themselves is to push others down. This is the stuff bullies are made of.

Psychologists tell us our personalities are mostly cemented by the age of five, so once a child’s spirit has been broken in this way, they can carry that shoulder chip for a lifetime. For these unfortunate souls, no amount of money, power, success, or praise is enough to replace what their parents would not give them: a feeling of belonging.

Sadly, the American president-elect is such a person. And when a person with this breed of painful self-loathing is given power and a pulpit, they empower others who suffer from the same damaged state of being to act on their anguish in similar ways. 

Unfortunately, there is no easy solution. People like this tend to do the same thing to their children that was done to them, so breaking the cycle becomes like cutting off the head of the Hydra. (I suppose we should be thankful that many of these unfortunate souls cannot attract mates, so their chance of producing a new crop of bullies is slim.) 

It is tempting to feel hopeless against them, but I find some comfort in knowing this is nothing new and that the majority of people are not like this. No parent is perfect, but most of us manage to show enough love to our children to keep them from taking up arms—verbally or physically—against the world. But when one of these broken children grows up and attains a leadership role, others like them are given license to come out of the shadows and wreak havoc. We saw incidents of bullying skyrocket in Trump’s first administration.

This is one reason why compassionate political policies and social safety nets are essential. We humans are pack animals and we tend to follow our leaders’ example. Under compassionate governance, crime rates, bullying, and random violence subside. Under bullying, hard-nosed regimes, they soar. 

These are predictable results, but, as the saying goes, those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. 

Unfortunately, many people continue to believe societies need a strong, unforgiving father figure who will rule with an iron fist to keep “others” under control. According to family members, that describes the mentality of the president-elect’s father. Were Scrooge not fictional, it would probably describe his father, too.

Where’s Jacob Marley when you need him? 

Since laughter is said to be the best medicine, let’s grab a handful of chuckle pills via Wayno’s week of Bizarro cartoons…

You can really work up an appetite driving in a circle all day.

Sometimes death is the gift that keeps on giving.

If there are no comedians on the guest list, he may want to reconsider attending.

QUICK ASIDE: A gallery that handles my Bizarro art is having an auction for the holidays. Looking for an unusual gift? Find it here. Don’t give gifts at the holidays? Reward yourself for your frugality. Want to gift a cartoonist? I’ll be as giddy as a kid with a new bike!

They assure me purchases will arrive before Xmas. This auction ends a week from today!

A different shop is offering Bizarro holiday ornaments. We get giddy when you nab those, too!

Linus practices a kind of fictional veganism.

If the audience doesn’t like the poem, the pottery gets slammed.

I can’t help but wonder if the handmaiden is attaching a “kick me” sign.

That concludes this episode of talking drawings. If you like this kind of thing and have wondered how we can keep providing it for free, so have we. Please consider helping us keep this going via one or more of the links below. Your donation will make us smile.

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