Welcome To Mars by Ken Hollings

Welcome To Mars Reviews

• 
  Tim Pendry

  Ken Hollings is part of a crew of imaginative writers in London who are interested in the byways of popular culture and consciousness and are perhaps best represented by the Strange Attractor Journal (now into Issue Four) and by the broadcasts on Resonance FM.
  
  Mark Pilkington, who runs Strange Attractor Press, covers some of the territory of this book in ‘Mirage Men’ (2010) but the two works are complementary rather than competitive.
  
  Pilkington’s primary concern is in the disinformation and paranoia surrounding UFOs. He writes a personal narrative based on his own search for the truth behind the mythos, an investigation that leads him into the murky world of the military-industrial complex (of which more another day).
  
  Hollings looks at the same cultural milieu but from a different perspective – by observing events during the early Cold War (1947-1959) year-on-year and looking for instructive connections.
  
  If you want a simple answer to what was American culture during the age of its maximum militarisation and organisation into conformity, then you won’t find it.
  
  Hollings’ technique is not to force a narrative on you but to tell sufficient of the tale that you can start to build your own narrative from his anecdotes and interconnections.
  
  So this review is my narrative – yours may be different. Although there are occasional ambiguities and the story, perforce, has to stop in its trajectory, so to speak, in 1959, begging for a sequel about the 1960s, he succeeds magnificently.
  
  Hollings intertwines popular culture (largely through the science fiction films of the era), the construction of the UFO mythos, social changes that developed out of military planning, the use of science by the military, organisational theory and the invention and exploration of pharmaceuticals into a tale of a culture that lost its moral compass without ever falling into the dreadful criminality of more obviously totalitarian regimes.
  
  But let there be no mistake in this. American culture remained free enough to enable resistance to its own extremisms, a flowering of which briefly took place in the 1960s only to be crushed soon after, and it remains free in that sense of possibility today
  
  However, the construction, out of the world of the New Deal, the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, of the military-industrial complex was to all intents and purposes quasi-totalitarian in effect.
  
  To read this book is to see America in a new way, a way that does not mean that it was precisely equivalent to the evil regime it defeated or its rival in communism.
  
  Nevertheless, fear and anxiety in the American State created not merely paranoia within itself and in the popular culture of the period but also a profound loss of moral compass in using persons as means instead of ends in themselves.
  
  In the end, it rationalised the balance of terror to the extent that the criminal horrors of Vietnam under Robert McNamara seem now not merely possible but inevitable.
  
  Two acts jump out of the pages of this book that suggest why this nation has become so dangerous and why the ‘beacon on the hill’ of the crusade against fascism is not the same nation today.
  
  There is the addition of the phrase ‘Under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and, in 1956, Subtitle I Part A Chapter 3, Section 302 of the US Code replaced ‘e pluribus unum’ with ‘In God We trust’ as the nation’s official motto.
  
  These two changes at the height of the Cold War are not trivial.
  
  They are truly totalitarian because they lead to the assertion that loyalty is not to a community of persons organised in a contractual State (the original secular concept of the Republic) but to a community that is, in some way, beholden to a concept outside itself.
  
  Godless communism was to be faced off by a republic, if not with divine sanction, one placing itself under God’s protection even though there was no sign that he existed any more than the flying saucers that ‘appeared’ periodically.
  
  This belief in God and the belief in flying saucers appear to be two sides of the same coin of an irrationality that became necessitated by the excess of rationalism in the search for military superiority.
  
  America lost its core rationality just as it presided over the most determined imposition of rationalism on human existence since the New Man Soviet experimentation of the interwar period.
  
  Paranoid cinema, the selling of bunkers and high military expenditures on nuclear fear and flying saucer scares (which originally had marginal support as signs of extraterrestrial visitation) were all aspects of a system where resistance could only be expressed either in codes or in ‘delinquency’.
  
  The US had long since suppressed an open attitude to sexuality. We must not forget that political dissent was quickly crushed in the atmosphere of fear surrounding the ideas of any liberal who saw redistribution and popular control of the means of production as possible.
  
  Now, the State consciously suppressed information and bound its population into a growth scenario that was very much based on military expenditures, either to its own convenience or as spin-off benefits.
  
  The transfer of military factories to distant locations was matched by the creation of suburbs that had been designed on principles derived from modernism and military pre-fabrication.
  
  The highway system was designed to ensure rapid evacuation of citizens and free up troop and hardware movements - and helped to create America’s now-fateful dependence on the automobile.
  
  The corporations that built nuclear power plants also made the household equipment that went into the new suburban homes.
  
  Walt Disney used Nazi war criminal Von Braun to promote Disneyland and so helped promote the ambitions of the rocketeers to take war into space.
  
  Everything was ambiguous. Consciousness-changing drugs (like LSD) were liberatory for a small elite but also of considerable interest to the CIA who attempted to corner the market in them and to take indirect charge of their scientific investigation.
  
  They also became intimately connected to the application of behaviourist techniques to mind control that could double up either as mental health solutions or as means of controlling foreign populations and agents.
  
  The ambiguity extended to the very non-Kantian and post-Nazi use of persons as objects in experimentation.
  
  This was scarcely a moral issue in any Western culture until the Nuremburg Trials resulted in a Code of Ethics that limited psychological and health experimentation - but only up to a point.
  
  To discipline the profession, you had to know precisely what it was up to ...
  
  Government agents in small units were not merely experimenting on colleagues without their consent but positively misleading large numbers of citizens, notably children in Massachusetts in 1950, into taking dangerous substances.
  
  In San Francisco, a dodgy special unit of the CIA was using hookers to test psychotropics on visiting businessmen not long after that.
  
  Behind all this, was an attitude of mind that was positively and deliberately both modernist and scientific, a different form of scientific materialism perhaps.
  
  If so, it was a scientific materialism with God added as a political and cultural afterthought as if a deliberate differentiator from Sovietism was now needed in addition to a not very secure sense of ‘freedom’.
  
  As Reynolds has pointed out, the ideal of liberty competes with the idea of God in American culture - bringing God into play conveniently lessens the need for freedom.
  
  This was a culture of behaviourism in psychology and of game theory in strategy, of engineering to build better weaponry and of organisational excellence, of command and control.
  
  It positioned anti-Soviet capitalism as mirror image, only more effective, of its chief enemy.
  
  This was the triumph of the autistic rational man, the person who had no understanding of the masses except as a mass to be analysed and normalised (or abnormalised) sexually (Kinsey), psychologically and materially.
  
  Even the Mental Health Act of 1946 was largely driven not by the welfarist needs of the population but by the discovery of the numbers of mentally disturbed servicemen in wartime and a need to reform in order to mobilise.
  
  The best that might be said was that this culture was national-paternalistic, a mild throw-back to that aspect of the New Deal that sought to save free capitalism from fascism and socialism by mimicking some of its attributes.
  
  Contemporary America is thus the creation of this era as much as it is of all its succeeding and preceding eras.
  
  The Nixon reaction to the libertarian revolt of the 1960s was based on his mental perceptions of what America had to offer to counter Khruschev.
  
  Reagan's culture was that of the Western States (like Nixon) whose economic and political power was created out of the development promoted by military-industrialism.
  
  Reagan merely returned the country to its freedom-based mythos without tampering, indeed by extending, a machine that now no longer needed to control its population (a situation being reversed today under the cloak of the paranoid fear of terrorism).
  
  Reagan’s genius was simply that of confidence that things would hold together and that ‘special measures’ were simply not necessary. Interestingly, Reagan wasn't that much interested in God.
  
  Above all, though it would be foolish to deny that in many respects the US is still more free than much of the rest of the world, that the US is as free as it thinks it is must be very moot point.
  
  That is another debate entirely but the insertion of theism into the American system, the integration of science with strategic-military rather than national welfare ends, the ambiguous role of the entertainment and media industries as social steam valves as much as oppressive agents of conformity and the mutual dependence of big business and the strategic-security lobby now appear to be embedded in this imperial culture.
  
  This book does not provide a theory. It is simply a narrative.
  
  Nor is it a complete picture by any means (a far better guide to history would be David Reynolds’ ‘Empire of Liberty, also reviewed on GoodReads).
  
  But it is highly recommended for teasing out connections that come down to presenting us with a sub-totalitarian system developed by a small rationalising elite to which resistance became not futile by any means.
  
  Not futile but reduced into ‘beatnik’ and popular cultural codes and teenage rebellion by fear and a lack of access by dissenters to the media that otherwise spoke to them directly.
  
  From this perspective, the potential importance of the internet, created by the same military-industrial complex, is considerable – except that it is danger of becoming an outlet for paranoia, rage and despair in the social media rather than an agency for effective political or cultural reaction.
  
  In that sense, as liberals hissy-fit over the latest bit of cultural politics or tin-pot war, ‘plus ca change’.
  
  Hollings tells the story of the naivete of EC Comics whose schlock-horror comics were faced by the damning testimony of a rationalising scientific ‘expert’ to Congress.
  
  The truth was that the comics were doing no harm at all (later, the adult industry would handle things better) but this ‘expert’ spoke to the conservative fear and paranoia of politicians.
  
  This eliter group feared the ‘enemy within’ and saw children not as persons in themselves but, effectively, as survival fodder for the coming nuclear exchange.
  
  The inchoate ‘baby boomer’ rebellion eventually took the tools given to it by the system and turned them against it - but then had no theory or strategy to resist the reaction of conservative America.
  
  In the end, the ‘sixties’ were simply about one generation of the elite turning on the rest but developing no communication with the masses of their own generation or any persuasive language for speaking to their elders.
  
  The great victory was perhaps to assist in bringing blacks and women into the political process and to ensure that a genuinely liberal coalition always faced off a genuinely conservative one but the actual structures of power have scarcely changed.
  
  Today, America is in pain (as it was in the 1970s) only because blindness to the actual structures of military-corporate socialism is not being made politically irrelevant by continued economic growth.
  
  The huge welfare structure that has grown irrationally on the back of the New Deal (the pre-condition for acceptance of militarism) is competing with a Great Power mentality.
  
  The highest result of all that sixties liberalism is that a black and a woman now order tomahawk missiles and drones into battle.
  
  American liberals are terribly impressed with all this ‘achievement’ but, after reading this book, it now seems like some gilding on some very tatty furniture.
  
  Although the liberals have succeeded in stopping persons being treated as things within the bounds of the United States, they have not stopped the imperial monster from treating foreigners like things instead of persons.
  
  The killing continues, if more subtly than in the days of Robert McNamara ...
  
• 
  Lori L (She Treads Softly)

  Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America by Ken Hollings is highly recommended for a very specific audience. "The dangers of nuclear annihilation, radiation poisoning, and the effects of atomic fallout were becoming manifestly apparent even to those who had flunked out of science in high school. A trip to the drive-in could teach you an awful lot in those days." If you are a fan of science fiction movies from the 50s and also a student of history and politics of the times then Welcome to Mars will likely highly appeal to you.
  
  "As Hollings plays connect-the-dots between monster movies, nuclear submarines, and LSD, between Sputnik, brainwashing, and TV dinners, he is tracing the wires of our own unconscious, and filtering the electronic ether that we breathe." Erik Davis writes in the forward. "Perhaps the atomic tests of 1945—or even the discovery of Nag Hammadi’s great Gnostic library, as Philip K. Dick believed—set off a chain reaction in reality itself, and LSD and Dianetics and Robby the Robot are all telling us the same thing, a message we still haven’t really processed: Welcome to Mars."
  
  This is one of those books that isn't for everyone but those of you who will like it, will like it a lot. Now you may not agree with all of Hollings conclusions, but you will be able to follow his thoughts and conclusions. He also makes some connections and provides all the research and information on the topics in one place. Hollings admits that Welcome to Mars is about "trying to locate a specific fantasy as precisely as possible in time and space." And he covers a lot of information and facts that tie into the historical fantasies we entertained. For example he researches when flying saucers, as well as when the psychiatric movie, entered into the main stream of American culture.
  
  Personally, I had no idea that MIT and the National Institutes for Health, the Atomic energy Commission, and Quaker Oats participated in “nontherapeutic” research on children involving radiation until 1953 “to determine how the body absorbed iron, calcium, and other minerals from dietary sources and to explore the effect of various compounds in cereal on mineral absorption”
  
  While Hollings is discussing the historical and cultural significance of pop culture in the 50's he also has a wry sense of humor that I appreciated and enjoyed. He captured the prevailing attitudes of the time. For example:
  "The whole crew may die at the end of the movie, and the meteorites they encounter may have been potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil, but Rocketship X-M’s narrative drive and lack of scientific gravitas both prove popular at the box office." (Location 945)
  “He was very nice about it,” one Army doctor remarks to another as they prepare to enjoy the rich full flavor you can only get with an unfiltered, high-tar cigarette, “but he made me feel like a third-class witchdoctor.” (Location 1132)
  
  Hollings also is clear to point out when various connections were made that we take for granted today, such as Captain Video being sponsored by Skippy Peanut Butter and Post Cereals to attract the young consumers who tuned in to the show. Where Hollings succeeds is in making cultural connections during post WWII that tie pop culture, technology, and political positions together to give a glimpse of society during that time. This is the time that introduced cybernetics, LSD, the nuclear arms race and space race, psychoanalysis, aliens from space, game theory, Scientology, etc. into our culture.
  
  With the chapters organized by year, Welcome to Mars is well written and researched. As long time followers know I love it when nonfiction books contain a bibliography, index, and list of illustrations. I really enjoyed Welcome to Mars, but I also know this isn't a book for everyone.
  
  Table of Contents
  Introduction: Scenes From A History As Yet Unwritten
  Chapter 1—1947: Rebuilding Lemuria
  Chapter 2—1948: Flying Saucers Over America
  Chapter 3—1949: Behaviour Modification
  Chapter 4—1950: Cheapness And Splendour
  Chapter 5—1951: Absolute Elsewhere
  Chapter 6—1952: Red Planet
  Chapter 7—1953: Other Tongues, Other Flesh
  Chapter 8—1954: Meet The Monsters
  Chapter 9—1955: Popular Mechanics
  Chapter 10—1956: 'Greetings, My Friend!'
  Chapter 11—1957: Contact With Space
  Chapter 12—1958: Mass Hysteria
  Chapter 13—1959: Teenagers From Outer Space
  Conclusion: Thinking the Unthinkable
  Bibliography
  Index
  List of Illustrations
  
  Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of North Atlantic Books for review purposes.
• 
  Willy Boy

  Wonderful - a novelistic assembly of fact and fantasy from the space age. The distinction between reality and imagination is made irrelevant. A collage of familiar and strange anecdotes illustrate the paranoiac mindset of the Cold War (and it's obverse, the thrilling and terrifying promise of a drastically changed world). The emotional tenor of the time is captured to mesmerizing effect. Succinct and elegant, respectfully distant - history as crystalline form growing beneath the lens of a microscope. A near-myth of epic proportions!
  
• 
  Jose

  Se lee de una tacada. Es algo así como la mezcla perfecta entre Jose Luis Garci ubicando a los espectadores en el contexto del año de producción de la película que emite en base a 3 o 4 noticias relevantes de dicho año, los documentales-ensayo de Adam Curtis y los monográficos de cultura pop del Mondo Brutto.
  
  Eso sí, para nada Hollings es tan sesgado y cogemanos como viene resultando últimamente Adam Curtis, que parece que si ese edificio que es la historia tiene diversas formas de recorrerlo a la hora de confrontarlo y evaluarlo a sus espectadores les obliga a sentarse en una silla de ruedas para empujarles por la rampita que a él le plazca: hay un sesgo a la hora de seleccionar eventos, países a estudiar y demás, pero precisamente por dicho sesgo de estilo (imprescindible para ser un ejercicio de síntesis y no un mero repositorio de fechas, hitos, nombres y acrónimos) se comede bastante en incurrir en varios otros. Y así queda la idea de cómo surge el estado de las cosas de la cultura occidental, en base a la geopolítica resultante de la Guerra Fría en cuanto al objeto de estudio (EEUU, a fin de cuentas agente imperialista que impondrá al resto de Occidente sus productos, tendencias de consumo, modas, adicciones y cuanto le venga en gana) y diversas ramas de la ciencia interesadas por el control mental tanto del enemigo como del pueblo "soberano" (jejeje) al que representan y defienden.
  
  PD: lo de la economía de mercado descubriendo al segmento teenager como target a nombrar, identificar y fidelizar, bien desarrollado y con sus gráficas ponderando su consumo sobre el PIM y el PIB podría dar lugar al libro definitivo sobre la importancia de la cultura pop no sólo como cuestión autónoma de cualquier otra sino que también como elemento capital en un crecimiento económico inédito hasta la década de los 50.
• 
  Fraser Sherman

  There's an interesting core idea in Hollings argument that the 1950s were as open to the weird and strange as the next two decades are known for: In the 1950s, after all, Americans embraced flying saucers as real, dabbled with LSD, saw humanity take its first steps into space, speculated about reincarnation... but in attempting to build on that core, it turns out Hollings has nothing terribly deep to say. He also tries way too hard to be clever like arguing the United States is the mythical lost continent of Lemuria (if Lemuria is imaginary, it can be anywhere, so why not!). Color me unimpressed.
• 
  Bryony Marsh

  A superb, focused and entirely accessible history of weird beliefs from Kenneth Arnold through to the early days of NASA. Discover how fiction shaped fringe beliefs, and how fringe beliefs influenced the business world. This is a highly enjoyable romp through the golden era of woo: a more innocent age when conspiracies and cover-ups really happened, when fraudsters claimed to have been contacted by UFOnauts and when far too many people believed them. Science has given us a lot, but it’s also eroded our ability to believe nonsense. Read Ken Hollings book (and/or listen to the companion 12-part podcast) and wallow in some woo, just for a little while. It’s fab.
• 
  Silvia Ballero

  Il libro tratta temi molto interessanti, creando collegamenti non banali tra eventi rilevanti degli anni del dopoguerra tra trend culturali, progetti segreti, propaganda e percezione, ma ha l'enorme difetto di rivolgersi a un pubblico che conosce già ciò di cui si parla e che al più può essere interessato a vederne la connessione. Il risultato è che un lettore che si avvicini a certi argomenti per la prima volta si trova investito da una raffica di riferimenti culturali che per lui hanno poco o nullo significato. Alcune scelte fraseologiche poi sono incomprensibili. Non saprei quindi se consigliarlo o meno.
• 
  Online Eccentric Librarian

  
  

  More reviews (and no fluff) on the blog
  http://surrealtalvi.wordpress.com/

  
  Did you ever meet someone at a part who seems perfectly normal, almost boringly so, and then as you start talking he/she starts to get really tangential and far out in their beliefs/thoughts? Because this is what Welcome to Mars feels like - a perfectly normal seeming book that then goes right off into the deep end of conspiracies, cover ups, and more in post war America.
  
  The book is broken down by year, from 1947 to 1959, and merges all kinds of stories and culture items as they relate to science or science fiction. You might see a story about Massachusetts irradiating their children's school lunches in 1950 under the pretense of 'studying nutritional habits" and that will eventually segue into Kaiser building California suburbs into which Klaatu found itself in The Day The Earth Stood Still.
  
  The writing is dense, moves disjointedly from topic to topic, and tries, perhaps vainly, to put an overall yearly theme to really random events across the US in that year. Lectures, government documents, movies and TV, private corporation goals and products, scientific advancements...there is a lot of information here but somehow nothing really pulls together into something worth reading. It was just too much like reading a conspiracy website or talking to someone with extreme political, religious, or other belief/values.
  
  I think this is the type of book that makes great debating material at intellectual parties. For me, I was looking for an interesting (but not THIS interesting) book on the period, discussing the more hopeful (perhaps Disney sanitized Tomorrowland) view of America. And to use the metaphors of the author, I wanted Star Trek but got Alien.
  
  I have to hand it to the author though, this is definitely a very unique book with a hitherto unpublished view on post war American science and science fiction. It just wasn't something I was interested in reading, though, in all its cold and clinical observations.
  
  Reviewed from an ARC.
• 
  Nicholas Pendleton

  Looking at the American Atomic Age through a dark funhouse mirror: A perfect companion piece to Hollings's radio/podcast series, an amazing schematic of the dark soul of the American Atomic Age. Paraphrasing Spalding Gray: Leave it to the British to teach Americans their own history. Hollings shows us how to see our pop culture again for the first time, connecting dots like the maddest of conspiracy theorists. Totally immersive and unsettling.
• 
  Nfpendleton

  A perfect companion to the radio series, an amazing schematic of the dark soul of the American Atomic Age. Paraphrasing Spaulding Grey: Leave it to the British to teach Americans their own history. Hollings shows us how to see our pop culture again for the first time, connecting dots like the maddest of conspiracy theorists. Totally immersive and unsettling.
• 
  Wade

  One of the best
  
  A skilled trip through 1950s america and our obsession with the space age and changing world. Tying together disparate fields, social and technological Billings pulls together a confusing time and gives it meaning.