CPA - The Guardian

If you look through any of those glossy, over-priced magazines devoted to house and garden, to home furnishings and decorating, to the latest and “best” in modern taste and style for your domicile, one thing you will probably not see is a clothesline.

Yuppies, socialites and trendsetters apparently don’t use them: they dry their washing in an electric dryer, of course. Ironically, they will still rattle on proudly about the steps they have taken to “reduce their carbon footprint” and will often boast about the green credentials of their architect-designed pad.

But using the sun to dry one’s washing crosses some line beyond which the middle class is not prepared to go. Hanging your washing where the neighbours can see it is – for middle-class Americans at any rate – a social faux pas worthy of public comment.

Last year, Carin Froehlich of Perkasie, Pennsylvania, was visited by a town official to ask her not to hang her washing on her clothesline. It seems two of her neighbours had complained, claiming that clothes drying in the sun “made the place look like trailer trash”. She also received anonymous letters of complaint.

Her neighbours were particularly upset, it seems, by the sight of her underwear on the line. “They said they didn’t want to look at my ‘unmentionables’ ”, Carin reported.

From which we can probably conclude that people who live in trailer parks and hang their washing to dry in the sun have a smaller carbon footprint than folk in swanky houses with all modern electric “labour-saving” devices. But the latter will still look down their noses at them as “trailer trash”.

Scientists are usually listened to with respect because they are acknowledged as experts in some field of knowledge and because, as scientists, they may be assumed to adhere to and to apply scientific method in their thinking and their pronouncements.

Sadly, they are also human, and are therefore prey to all the frailties of our species, including lapses into stupidity and mental breakdown.

Luchezar Filipov, deputy head of the Space Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Science, startled his colleagues and the media some weeks ago when he announced that aliens from other worlds “are here right now among us” and that they are “conducting surveillance” and “research” on humanity.

He listed several examples of what he termed “immoral behaviour” and “unnatural” acts to which the aliens strongly objected, including global warming, the use of cosmetics and artificial insemination!

Filipov, whose scientific career will likely be shortened now, said the aliens “are not hostile towards us; rather, they want to help us but we have not grown enough in order to establish direct contact with them.”

In George Stevens’ delightful screwball comedy from 1943, The More The Merrier, Joel McCrea’s government scientist is looking through his binoculars at something outside his Washington apartment window when a neighbour’s little boy comes by and sees him.

“Why haven’t you handed in your binoculars like we had to?” demands the kid. The very American McCrea scowls in annoyance and snaps at him: “Because I’m a Jap!” The kid runs off in terror.

Shortly thereafter the FBI raid McCrae’s apartment in search of the “Japanese saboteur” who has been reported to them by the boy’s mother. It is a funny sequence in a very funny film, one of the classics of the screwball comedies of the ‘30s and ‘40s.

The paranoia that got McCrea’s character into trouble was understandable in 1943. In recent decades, however, it has been revived and nurtured. This paranoia is now so useful to the social control programs of imperialism that many people now admit that if there were no genuine terrorist acts, imperialism would have to provide them.

Paranoia is now endemic and all but official among security forces doing routine patrol work, whether police on the beat in London or the National Guard doing boarding security checks at US airports.

The abuses that arise from this paranoia are many and varied and are well documented and deeply resented by most people as unnecessary infringements on their democratic rights.

It could be a peace activist refused air travel (and publicly abused by the security guard) in the US because she is on a list of “subversives”, or the man innocently photographing the view of St Paul’s cathedral at sunset who is stopped by a policewoman, made to give his ID details and then issued with an anti-terrorism stop and search form.

“I pointed out that nearly every other person walking along the South Bank was taking pictures of the view using their mobile phones and we had drawn her attention because we were using cameras.” (But that is how you spot terrorists, you see, by their big professional-looking cameras. No hidden cameras for them!)

His logic was to no avail, however. “I was outraged at such an infringement of my liberty”, said Jeff Overs, especially since, as a BBC photographer, in seeking to photograph St Paul’s at sunset he was in fact pursuing his craft.

The policewoman and her companion (a “community support officer”) told Overs that he “could be doing a recce for a terrorist attack”. He lodged a complaint with the Metropolitan Police.

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