Tippi Hedren is the actress whose intelligence illuminated Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Now, 52 years later, Hedren is still an illuminating person — as shown by her powerful performance at a hearing managed by the board of asses who are in charge of California’s “bullet train.”
The train — which does not exist and may never exist — is the biggest (putative) construction project in American history, and perhaps the biggest boondoggle, a reduction ad absurdum of “planning for the environment,” “planning for energy conservation,” and all the rest of it. Its cost estimates are 600% higher than the voters thought they were mandating, and this is one reason the majority of voters now wish they hadn’t listened to propaganda for the project. They agreed to build a railroad that would deliver passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a time substantially less than three hours. It’s now clear that there’s no possibility this can happen, or anything close to it, no matter where the rail line is put. But no one knows where it will be put. The managers of the project, the California High Speed Rail Authority, insensately determined to carry on despite the many kinds of fools they are making of themselves, are still deciding which communities they’re going to unleash their bulldozers on.
Another assumption is that it’s efficient to destroy a series of towns in the pursuit of what is in fact slow-speed rail.
They have to hold public hearings about this. Unfortunately, they don’t have to listen to what they hear at them, and they don’t. The latest hearing involved outraged residents of several Southern California towns that may be devastated by the train. One of them is Acton, where Hedren operates an animal-rescue preserve that caters to big cats. So Hedren showed up at the hearing.
Dan Richard, chairman of the Authority, used the occasion to pontificate: “What we’re building here, by the way, in high-speed rail, is the most efficient way to deal with our transportation needs of the future." “By the way?” The rhetoric is almost as condescending as the statement itself, which assumes that its audience is stupid enough to believe it’s efficient to spend at least $100 billion to propel a few hundred people a day to a destination they could have reached more quickly and cheaply by air. Another assumption is that it’s efficient to destroy a series of towns in the pursuit of what is in fact slow-speed rail.
Hedren, 85, identified the problem with people who make statements like that: "You don't listen, you don't care. . . . You are going to take this beautiful little town of Acton . . . and you are going to destroy it with this train." Then she mentioned the lions and tigers she cares for (but has no illusions about). "I am more afraid of you," she told the planners.
