Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Everyone’s asking me what I thought of the inauguration yesterday and the contracted speech (no, Obama didn’t write it — a 27 year old white professional propagandist kid did)… It will be very interesting to see how much actual “CHANGE” President Obama is able push through over the next few years. I think he’s more centrist than many of his followers see him as — he’s no Kucinich — but at the same time, I think he’s more dedicated to and capable of actually doing what he says. That said, as much as the neo-con figurehead/mascot that was Bush rode off into the sunset (that is, sold his faux ranch and moved into a whites-only gated urban community), the forces he represented — the rich — are deeply ingrained in the political process and still have an enormous amount of power.

Take the widely supported financial bailouts… In my opinion, they do very little to help the “little man”, since it’s all money borrowed — with enormous interest — from the people anyway. As I see it, the rich unsustainably stole enormous amounts of money from the system, and when the system collapsed, instead of being forced to put that money back into the system, they simply took by force the required assets from the poor in order to allow their crime to continue. One of the biggest reasons that I think Obama could be a good thing is that he’s the least indebted to the wealthy and the corporate, and the most recently poor personally. For the last hundred-plus years, the US government (and really, most governments around the world) has worked for one primary purpose — to move wealth up the class system, and keep it there. What I’m most excited about is that Obama may be a politician dedicated to reversing that trend while at the same time protecting the free market system.

Anyway… I’m continuing to work on the Kubla Khan children’s book… Today after school I’m going to pick up a couple more panels so I can get started on the next pages. I think I’m going to 90% finish everything, and then come back to them for the finishing touches. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to post-process them digitally or keep the process “pure”. I’m leaning toward the latter but there’s a lot to be said about the former.