Kicking the can down the crumbling road

This is why we can’t have nice things.

The Connecticut legislature was unable to pass — or even vote on — truck toll legislation. This was after missing more deadlines than George R.R. Martin trying to finish the sixth novel in his “A Song of Gantries and Fire” series.

It is quite possible that, in 2058, the ragged, dirty-faced remnants of Connecticut humanity will gather in huddled knots around the blasted after-scape of our once-proud state, cooking scrawny rabbits over trash fires and conducting primitive rituals in which they attempt to pass toll legislation using Husky skulls, magic gourds, readings from the tattered Book of Fasano and puppet plays based loosely on the writings of Dan Haar.

Let me make something clear.

I don’t need for there to be tolls.

I also don’t need for there not to be tolls.

If there’s anything I need — apart from better psych meds than I am currently getting — it’s to have a state government with the capacity to occasionally make decisions on mildly important questions.

And let’s be clear, truck tolls were, at most, a mildly important question.

That the Democratic majorities in both chambers would regard voting on truck tolls with such abject terror makes you wonder what they would do if they were ever faced with something genuinely dire and difficult.

Ironically, a scenario like that becomes more probable as a result of their current fecklessness. Funny thing. I first wrote “cowardice,” but really, that would amount to elevating both the question and its stakes. You get called a coward when faced with a stark choice between right and wrong and you don’t have the guts to do what’s right.

If you can’t vote on truck tolls, it’s more a matter of being useless.

During the past couple of weeks, the two chambers tried to work out an accommodation that made them seem like two trembling high school students trying to muster the nerve to jump off Pencil Rock into the old quarry pool. You go first. No you. Let’s hold hands.

They wanted to vote simultaneously, and then some genius realized a bill has to pass in one chamber before it can be passed in the other. So there was — I wish I were making this up — another plan in which each chamber would pass six of the 12 toll gantries, and then there would be this “Bridge of Spies” moment where a person from each body would slowly walk toward Checkpoint Charlie (which I believe is the desk of Rep. Charlie Stallworth of Bridgeport) and swap demi-bills.

Then it turned out they couldn’t even do that.

This is why “fecklessness” is a better word than “cowardice.” Yes, they’re chicken. But they’re mainly dumb as a bag of hammers.

Here is the sad part. All of this self-inflicted uselessness arises from the belief that some Democratic legislators would lose their seats in November. Over truck tolls.

Paradoxically, the decision to go with truck tolls instead of a generalized tolling plan was based on the craven desire to find a revenue source that 99 percent of the voters wouldn’t have to pay for.

But it was still too scary. Really? You don’t think you could win that argument?

Republican challenger:

“My opponent voted for truck tolls!”

Democratic incumbent:

“You’re damn right I voted for truck tolls. The bridges aren’t safe, the roads are crumbling and the trains are like Uruguay before Uruguay got better trains. But I wasn’t going to toll you and your kids, putt-putting along in your 2015 Kia Sorento. No sir! I made the truckers pay the bill instead. Who looks out for you? Who loves you, dammit?”

I should run for office. The legislature is weak. The executive branch is sad.

So sad. Gov. Ned Lamont is like Charlie Brown walking home from one of those baseball games where each line drive actually knocks his clothes off and the little redhaired girl turned and got into her parents’ car just as he was summoning the will to talk to her and Snoopy ate his peanut butter sandwich and Lucy told him he was a blockhead to want tolls in the first place and then charged him five cents for a therapy session and now he is walking home, slumped forward with almost unbearably melancholy music playing from an unseen source.

Ned is that kind of sad. In announcing Wednesday that he had given up on tolls, he twice invoked what is possibly the most frequently invoked image in Connecticut politics: kicking the can down the road.

But there are two kinds of can-kicking. There’s the heedless kind, like the free-spending grasshopper in “Aesop’s Fables.” And then there’s the sad, Randy Newman kind: “Lonely, Lonely. Tin can at my feet. Think I’ll kick it down the street. That’s the way to treat a friend.”

In Ned’s mind, the legislature has done so much of the first kind of can-kicking that they have pushed him into doing the second kind.

When everybody is weak and/or sad, it tends to empower small groups of activists who show up at the Capitol foaming at the mouth over tolls or guns or, in the case of last week’s vaccine objectors, because they have contracted a disease formerly confined to cattle populations.

This is what we have to look forward to. Maybe we should just turn the whole government over to these people. Let them make big Sharpie hand-lettered signs calling each other liars and witches and let them battle it out on the Capitol grounds.

While we cook a nice rabbit over a trash fire.