Clotheslining the Clothesline Bans

Here's a factoid, which leads to a sign of the times: Electric clothes dryers use at least 6 percent of all household electricity consumption.

That, from an article in today's NYTimes about the national movement to overturn local ordinances and property-owner covenants to allow the air drying of laundry outside.

Who'd have thunk it would come to a national "movement"? We've already waxed poetic about the aesthetics of wind-blown laundry, but that was set off by a purely parochial case of snobbishness in our own Hendersonville. Apparently, there's a nationwide uprising, with states from Vermont to Hawaii passing laws to affirm that it's an American right to air-dry.

For some upscale property owners, however, flapping laundry appears to signal nothing more than poverty, and they don't want to be associated with poverty, nor have their eyes assaulted by such poor homework.

How 1950s of them!