Michelle de Werd is right to be troubled by the applause at the Los Olivos Community Services District meeting (“Opposing the Los Olivos sewer pipeline,” July 17), and wrong about exactly one word: “silly.”
I conduct orchestras for a living, and applause is the part of an evening I understand best. It is rarely as spontaneous as audiences believe. Nineteenth-century opera houses employed a professional claque—men paid by the seat, with specialists among them: the rieur to laugh, the pleureur to weep, the bisseur to demand encores. A dozen well-placed people can make a hall of two thousand sound unanimous, and everyone else goes home convinced they witnessed enthusiasm.
So the question to ask about the row that erupted for a $60 million pipeline is not why those people were foolish. It is who seated them, and what they are applauding for.
Ms. de Werd supplies the answer herself, in her final two sentences. The Proposition 218 protest vote is weighted, and the hotels and restaurants already hold the majority. This means the outcome was determined years ago by whoever wrote that formula, and the meeting was a performance of a result already scored.
She writes that infrastructure dictates destiny. Just so—and a voting rule is infrastructure too. It was laid long before any pipe, and it runs in the same direction.
Applause and weighted ballots do identical work: they make a handful of people sound like everyone. The difference is that in the opera house we at least admit the claque is paid.
I started a band in Santa Barbara in the 1980s and have been listening to rooms ever since. That row did not sound like 370 neighbors to me.
