"Jug Jug" to dirty ears

In the myth of Philomel and Tereus, Philomel has her tongue cut out so that she could never speak of the rape Tereus had done to her. Ovid's graphicly describes it in the Metamorphoses: 'the remaining stump still quivered in her throat, while the tongue itself lay pulsing and murmuring incoherently to the dark earth. It writhed convulsively, like a snake's tail when it has newly been cut off."

Two days ago, the Supreme Court decided to refuse appeal for those who were detainees of Guantanamo Bay. The means that those who were held at the prison camp based in Cuba are not allowed to challenge their imprisonment.

At this point in my life, I'm trying really hard to understand things politically. I try to read the news as much as I can. I know the feeling I get when I hear about war. I try to separate what is good and what is bad the best way I can. I try to not get discouraged with apathy, and I try to understand the way things work in the world.
I feel, however, like most of the time, a thin veil of mesh is pulled over my eyes-- just loose enough for me to try and see the truth, but never really being able to understand the full effect of the matter.

I have read all of the articles that I can on the prisoner's of Guantanamo Bay. I still can't see the strain in my filter what I should agree with and what I should look away. What part of my American heart can fully forcingly nod at the capturing of what I'm told are my enemies, and what part of my American heart gasps and pulls at my hair?

Last weekend, my mother and I were invited to a church social at our old house of worship; a little tiny chapel in the middle of Owens Cross Roads, Alabama, just north of New Hope.
A woman that had taken care of me as a child, tended for me in the nursery and always made sure to learn of what I was doing, where, when, and how-- her son was being shipped off to take his first tour in Iraq. When I arrived and met him, he was young and holding hands with his high school sweetheart, the only one he proclaimed he had ever loved. And when I looked at him I thought of all the other reports that I had read and studied and tried to recognize and decipher about soliders in Iraq, and the things that they had done to citizens there.
And when I looked at him I tried to decide how he felt about going and fighting somewhere completely choatic, knowing that he could lose his life to some twelve year old with a car bomb, and a thousand year old chip on his shoulder that we as a young and still nubile country could never understand.

I feel like the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay are like Philomela, and we Americans are her Tereus, the rapers. And then I feel like were are the Tereus to Iraqi children. And then I think that they rape us, too, our soldiers just as confused as they are. And then I finally come to the image of our sand stricken bodies all personally invaded, and everyone has cut off everyone's tongue in the end, and we stand there like we are in the ancient city of Babel, just murmuring to each other and then raping some more to try and understand.