Stephen C. Rose

Jaws of Hell is a way of talking about a force which is not supernatural but is anchored in unfolding history. Discernable forces we do not want to face or try to understand and control. Jaws of Hell are what the New Testament calls principalities and powers. This post introduces the concept.

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UPDATE: This is the initial post among several where Jaws of Hell is used as a descriptive term. Link To A Menu
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My reading tends to go from pillar to post. Of late I have parked Shakespeare and Nietzsche on my shelves and turned to James Ellroy and to watching the cumulative DVDs of 24, Seasons One through Five.

I suppose one could say I was being entertained. I started reading Ellroy after seeing a flip interview he did with Deborah Solomon in the NYTimes Magazine. In which he allowed as how he was right up there with the novelistic greats — I forget who he cited, maybe Dostoevsky was among them.

I had never even known about 24 until I stumbled on an episode with its captivating split screen mode. I honestly had spaced out on the thing for five years. I had not censored Fox from my TV, just avoided it, as I avoid most sitcoms, action series, hospital slurps and whatever else is put out to presumably occupy the need of a populace for, what …

Anyway, Ellroy.

I read American Tabloid and I am moving through The Cold Six-Thousand, both of which document — in a conspiratorial but challenging way — the 1960s. I have already learned that JFK was killed by a conspiracy that hinged on the humiliations of the Bay of Pigs, one of the more idiotic chapters in our history.

Nonetheless, Ellroy manages to almost convince one that people we ought to try to feel some sympathy for were justified in seeing Castro as the devil incarnate and regarding his takeover of Cuba as the worst sin since Eve’s consumption of the apple.

Ellroy is interesting to a writer. One could get into his style:

Steve types. Steve SEEES Ellroy. Steve hates idiocy. Ellroy f**ks with idiocy. Ellroy SEEES under. Steve types. Ellroy …

It is mostly such short sentences.

And paragraphs more like these than the long graphs of the likes of … Dostoevesky.

Why link Ellroy and 24?

24 is after all a period piece from the present and future. Ellroy is trying to reprise the ’60s — at least in the two works I’ve dipped into. Both are formulaic. But that is not enough to warrant linkage.

What links them in my mind is their role as cultural preparatives. John the Baptists of Hell.

Preparing us for an essentially conspiratorial view of reality entirely consistent with tabloid culture and the sliding off of the populace into the end of the spectrum that most of us would love to wish did not exist, but does.

Softening us up for the demise of my values. Non-idolatry. Tolerance. Democracy. Helpfulness.

24 and Ellroy did not give us the worst excesses of our present nightmare. But Ellroy in particular understands the disfunctional reality of much American life and the edgy degeneration that would make much of the criminality, torture and shock and awe of the present entirely understandable.

And 24 legitimizes precisely the behavior — the torture and spontaneous zapping of folk — that we are being conditioned to believe must be part and parcel of an effective response to terror.

And against all this we have what?

Barack Obama? Hillary Clinton? (Actually neither looks that bad to me as I write. But then again it is morning.)

When I was yet in my teens, I watched JFK from the back balcony of the Senate where he occupied a desk next to Stuart Symington. (I was doing what now would be called a summer internship at the New Republic.)

I did not see JFK as someone who would require, as Ellroy surmises, probably with some accuracy, sexual healing every night far from the bonds of matrimonial convenience. But I did see him as immature. Pulling out Symington’s chair as the Missourian sat down. Bored. Whatever.

(The veneration of the Camelot era ranks as a cultural idiocy, but not because of that.

Ellroy makes plausible the notion that the mix of the Kennedys, Johnson, Hoover, the Cuba fanatics, the Klan and the Mob created a lethal brew that reguired the revenge (or convenient) decimation of JFK. And eventually of his brother as well.

This is not about whether that vision is true.

This is about the fact that, whether true or not, we are living somewhere close to the jaws of hell. The hell that folk who contribute to public radio do not think about too much. The hell that gets oddly sanitized in Ken Burns films. The hell that is not and never could be … beautiful.

And:

The hell that opens up when we see the inevitable decline of the folk who brought us Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly.

It is the hell of trembling liberalism.

Trembling liberalism in the face of a world that has been prepared for the flames of decimation by 9/11, shock and awe, Bush reductionism and … 24 … and Ellroy.

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Ellroy understands that there is no man righteous, no not one, to go through Dylan to Scripture.

24 suggests a similar understanding. It is amusing to see the veneration of Jack Bauer by souls who would puke in the death rooms of Baghdad.

In sordid reality, it is conflict — and acts of spontaneous violence — that tilts the world toward hell.

It is the only thing that does.

That is my mantra and I’m sticking to it.