There are two basic problems with extremely well-done propaganda. One, is that it is extremely well-done. The other, is that it is propaganda. Owing to the former, it is all too easy to overlook the latter, in other words.
Here we have a thoughtful, compelling, well-acted human drama about some really nice people, and the whole thing could easily be taken just as entertainment rather than as the carefully crafted infomercial for paternalistic social engineering by an all-knowing federal regime that it is.
Public housing really is the human calamity its opponents in the story here said it was going to be. Making it more pretty on the outside or mixing it in among "nice" neighborhoods does nothing to mitigate the corruption, vice, crime and especially untenable family life that it breeds.
Only near the end of these six episodes does the script actually touch briefly on a valid point about the real effects of these socialist warehousing projects, when it is pointed out in passing that most of the residents of these comfortable prisons are single women with children, who would lose their eligibility for the programs if the authorities ever found out there was a man in their house. This alone is probably the single most catastrophic consequence of the laws and regulations and agencies which oversee this massive undertaking to keep the slaves on the plantation: that men, as husbands, fathers of children and legitimate heads of households, are basically just in the way. The conditions for securing and then keeping these units work the same way as any other welfare program, which is that one is essentially punished for one's life situation becoming better, and so anyone who has such a home at public expense has every incentive to sustain the illusion of their "underprivileged" status or else be kicked out.
I worked for a public housing agency myself for a short time, and the phenomenon of the Invisible Man in these households was one of the constants. Not only do all the benefits of such programs go primarily to women, so does the status as a real parent and adult and citizen, since the man of the house's very existence is at best an open secret and at worst an act of fraud that has the whole family thrown out in the street.
Whatever other illusory and entirely cosmetic benefit to society these rowhouses may have brought, their primary effect has been to erase the relevance of manhood and fatherhood as an unnecessary and even criminal nuisance. As is made clear from the interviews and comments in the episode reviews after each segment from the production people, this show was done within a certain ideological and sociopolitical framework by true believers in these "theories" about how best to box up poor people to keep them out of the way, and they present the idea of a federal judge threatening to jail city council members for not voting the way they are ordered to as right and good and moral.
Naturally none of the production people would want to raise their own families in such a setting, but as always, the supercilious moralism of middle-class armchair socialists such as the movie industry is made up of assumes that what they think is best for their inferiors really is best for them whether it is or not. But gosh, it sure is a well-made TV show. If I didn't know better I would not have even noticed what a piece of liberal-progressive standard-issue agitprop it is.
Here we have a thoughtful, compelling, well-acted human drama about some really nice people, and the whole thing could easily be taken just as entertainment rather than as the carefully crafted infomercial for paternalistic social engineering by an all-knowing federal regime that it is.
Public housing really is the human calamity its opponents in the story here said it was going to be. Making it more pretty on the outside or mixing it in among "nice" neighborhoods does nothing to mitigate the corruption, vice, crime and especially untenable family life that it breeds.
Only near the end of these six episodes does the script actually touch briefly on a valid point about the real effects of these socialist warehousing projects, when it is pointed out in passing that most of the residents of these comfortable prisons are single women with children, who would lose their eligibility for the programs if the authorities ever found out there was a man in their house. This alone is probably the single most catastrophic consequence of the laws and regulations and agencies which oversee this massive undertaking to keep the slaves on the plantation: that men, as husbands, fathers of children and legitimate heads of households, are basically just in the way. The conditions for securing and then keeping these units work the same way as any other welfare program, which is that one is essentially punished for one's life situation becoming better, and so anyone who has such a home at public expense has every incentive to sustain the illusion of their "underprivileged" status or else be kicked out.
I worked for a public housing agency myself for a short time, and the phenomenon of the Invisible Man in these households was one of the constants. Not only do all the benefits of such programs go primarily to women, so does the status as a real parent and adult and citizen, since the man of the house's very existence is at best an open secret and at worst an act of fraud that has the whole family thrown out in the street.
Whatever other illusory and entirely cosmetic benefit to society these rowhouses may have brought, their primary effect has been to erase the relevance of manhood and fatherhood as an unnecessary and even criminal nuisance. As is made clear from the interviews and comments in the episode reviews after each segment from the production people, this show was done within a certain ideological and sociopolitical framework by true believers in these "theories" about how best to box up poor people to keep them out of the way, and they present the idea of a federal judge threatening to jail city council members for not voting the way they are ordered to as right and good and moral.
Naturally none of the production people would want to raise their own families in such a setting, but as always, the supercilious moralism of middle-class armchair socialists such as the movie industry is made up of assumes that what they think is best for their inferiors really is best for them whether it is or not. But gosh, it sure is a well-made TV show. If I didn't know better I would not have even noticed what a piece of liberal-progressive standard-issue agitprop it is.