Me: Lupe, it is good to speak with you. I heard there was a lot of talk about the comments you made a few days ago about the President and I wanted to give you a chance to further discuss your thoughts. I respect you as an artist and a poet and I think your opinion is important to the national discussion on where our country is going. Tell me more about where your opinions come from and how you came to the conclusion that the President is a “terrorist,” which although I might disagree with you on this one, I still want to give you the chance to explain.
Lupe: America was based on a hypocrisy and what we had done is basically an extension of that hypocrisy. I think that the Constitution was a hypocrisy in the sense that the same way you look at somebody like Glenn Beck as a hypocrite. On one level I agree with a lot of stuff that Glenn Beck says — this is to give you context for me and where my statements come from — I agree with the ideals that he speaks about when he talks about family values and when he talks about taking care of your own community. He talks a really good wholesome kind of game. The problem is, he’s not talking to anybody but white people. It’s really just the intention and the context of it. So there’s a certain level of hypocrisy that exists in America. And it started back from the constitution and all the people who wrote the Constitution and everything that they put in there it was good game, but all those people had slaves. The majority of the people had slaves or were sympathetic to slaveholders or were direct recipients of money from slavery and things like that and had businesses that dealt with plantations and people that had slaves. There’s a certain level of hypocrisy that existed from the inception of this country all the way up until today and we’re really just facing the remnants.
My issue and what I try and do is expose that hypocrisy but expand the conversation to make it honest. To make the conversation honest so it speaks to everyone so people become educated to those things. So for me it boils down to everything that America does. It’s foreign policy is very hypocritical, it’s very backwards. We don’t count the other bodies, for us the war is one-way. And they’re not even wars of attrition, not even honest wars. They’re not wars that were like wars that were fought 200 years ago or wars that were fought a hundred years ago. These are wars that are based on business. These are wars that are based on “let’s build these drones and we gotta try this technology but we need to make sure it works so we need to at least kill X amount of people so we can prove the value of this particular project that we spent 40 billion dollars on” so to speak. And you multiply times how many things are going through the Pentagon military industrial complex.
Full Interview @ GlobalGrind
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