American Public Radio's Media's "Marketplace" yesterday featured a report on the unglamorous but eminently sensible technological apparatus known as the clothesline.

You can read a transcript of the report at this link -- "Clotheslines: Energy saver or eyesore?" -- but you really owe it to yourself to click on the "listen to this story" link to hear for yourself the voice of the appalling Ceil Bell, a board member of a Timonium, Md., "homeowners' association" that prohibits clotheslines.

"Clothes drying is just unsightly," Bell says. "You get people hanging towels over the railings, you get clotheslines in the backyard. We just don't like the look of it. It looks like a lower-class neighborhood."

Apparently Bell thinks people in "lower-class neighborhoods" are, as a rule, smarter and more sensible than the prodigal idiots the Timonium homeowners' association hopes to attract.

These homeowners' associations fascinate me. Marketplace's Joel Rose reports that there are about 300,000 of these in the U.S., about half of which prohibit clothes lines. How does this prohibition work, exactly? How is it enforced? And by what authority do these Mayberry Mussolinis claim the right to tell others that they're only allowed to dry their clothes through the operation of energy-intensive, fossil-fuel burning machines (adding chemicals to make them smell almost, but not quite, like they had really been dried the sensible way, out in the sun)?

The Wikipedia entry on homeowners' associations answers some of those questions, but not the larger question of why on earth anyone would voluntarily submit to live in such prefab neighborhoods where, it seems, all that is not expressly permitted is forbidden. One could argue that this intrusive corporate governance of private life is un-American. But then I suppose one could also argue that the voluntary surrender of personal freedom in the hopes of attaining higher "property values" is quintessentially American.

Rose's report balances the odious attitude of Ceil Bell with two sets of Good Guys. First there's Gary Sutterlin, the U.S. representative for Hills Hoist -- the simple but ingenius folding rotary clothesline that is, Rose says, ubiquitous in Australia. Sutterlin says the use of a clothesline "will save the average consumer 6 to 10 percent of your utility costs." That's reason enough to use a clothesline without even getting into all of the environmental benefits or the lovely additional perk of ticking off the Ceil Bells of your neighborhood.

Then there's Alex Lee, director of Project Laundry List, a nonprofit dedicated to "making air-drying laundry acceptable and desirable as a simple and effective way to save energy." Their "Right to Dry Campaign" advocates the passage of Right to Dry legislation in states and municipalities to win Americans the right to, you know, access to the sun. (Wasn't denying that right the plot of a Philip K. Dick novel?)

And while you're clicking around that Laundry List site, be sure to check out their online store.

(Jeez, I've only been a homeowner for one week and already I'm resorting to laundry blogging.)