“What are your thoughts on a soft coup, Barnaby?”

We’re at our regular breakfast meeting. Cecil has broken with all precedent, gone rogue, as they say, switching up from his usual swish porridge to try some of this ‘new-fangled’ huevos rancheros. “The beans, I believe,” he rationalized, “offset any of the possible downside to eating eggs. The toast too is multigrain.”

“You only live once,” I assure him, watching as he navigates what looks to be his first ever encounter with guacamole. Cecil is many things but adventuresome in matters of foodstuffs he is not.

“What’s a soft coup?” I ask him.

“A soft coup, Barnaby, is a coup but for the right reasons.”

“Define ‘right reasons’, Cecil,” I said. “Because that’s a very subjective slippery slope you’ve plopped yourself onto.”

Setting down his fork, Cecil lifts the newspaper he’s reading off of the table and rattles it at me, not aggressively, more in order to de-crinkle the page of interest to him.

“I’ve been reading about how a National Security Advisor included a reporter in a group chat full of classified information and plans for bombing the Houthis in Yemen. Accidentally, it seems. The group chat inclusion, I mean, not the Houthi bombing. It went unnoticed until the reporter actually identified himself to the group days later, after the bombing took place.”

Ah, yes. The latest scandal du jour. Not to minimize or downplay it. But these people. Honestly. The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight would put them to shame.

“Firstly,” Cecil says, leaning over this plate of food toward me, his cup of coffee in one hand and the newspaper in the other. “What exactly is a ‘group chat’?”

Ahhhhh,

my dear, sweet, Cecil.

He had a smartphone for a while, back a few years ago now. Could never get the hang of it. Perpetually flustered by the thing. Errant phone calls. Regular butt dials. He did not possess the patience or interest in trying to master it. “Who needs all this information anyway!” he’d declare. “It’s a bad idea.”

There are days when it’s difficult to disagree with that sentiment.

“No, never mind,” Cecil insists before a word even leaves my mouth. “Don’t need to know. The point here is, the highest echelons of the Trump administration were discussing top secret matters, matters of national security in a forum that could be, apparently, easily accessed by hostile actors, foreign adversaries and the like. This is espionage level stuff here, Barnaby. A right royal cock-up, excuse me language. A major international incident, OK?”

“If we were living in a normal time in history,” I say.

“Exactly!” Cecil concurs.

He turns his attention back to the huevos rancheros in front of him, conspicuously avoiding the guacamole mound. Scoops up some eggs and beans, dropping them on a slice of toast, and pops it all into his mouth. He starts to talk but I stop him with a raised finger. We’ve discussed this, Cecil and I. Eat and swallow first, then talk. A lesson that must be learned and relearned for those of us ancients who have never fully re-adjusted to living on our own in our dotage.

Cecil finishes his mouthful, pops a little more food into his mouth, washes it down with some coffee and sits back in his chair.

“A soft coup,” he continues on with his train of thought, “isn’t based on ideology or politics. A soft coup is one that’s undertaken because of absolute incompetence and negligence by the key members of an administration. They’ve become threats to national security and interests. That’s what I’m talking about with a soft coup.”

“So, not for personal gain or simple power struggle, but for the good of the country?” I try and clarify.

“Exactly!” Cecil says, and sets back into his breakfast.

Still, a slippery slope, I think.

“Pinochet and his gang thought Salvador Allende was mismanaging the economy and therefore posed a grave threat to Chile’s national security and interests,” I offer. “Would you call that a soft coup, Cecil?”

He takes some time to ponder the question and finish the food he’s put into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully.

“I’m sure if you went down the list of all coups throughout the course of history, the justification of national security and interests was used regularly. Didn’t Julius Caesar think he was saving the Republic? Bonaparte the spirit of the revolution?”

“OK, sure,” Cecil allows. “But I’m not talking about the military taking over and running the country, Barnaby. Establishing some kind of junta. That wouldn’t be a soft coup. I’m saying that they remove the hydra of incompetence at the top. The President. VP. Secretary of Defense. National Security apparatus heads. Maybe throw that Elon Musk fella in there for good measure. And then allow for an orderly succession of power. They’ve got rules for that, yeah? Who would take over, become president and vice-president in a situation like this. They don’t have to kill everyone. Just put them on trial.”

“For incompetence?” I inquire.

“No, no, Barnaby,” Cecil insists. “For treason and giving aid and comfort to the enemy and whatnot.”

“Then exile them all to Elba?”

“Didn’t Napoleon escape from there? No. Maybe put them on one of those X rocket ships to Mars.”

Cecil turns back to the huevos rancheros, down to pretty much the guacamole now which he regards dubiously, poking cautiously at it with his fork as if to check that it hadn’t somehow become sentient.

“I mean, one could argue that if the military’s oath of allegiance is to the constitution, the Constitution,” I reiterated for emphasis, “and not to the country’s Executive branch, and if that said Executive branch is governing unconstitutionally—”

“And posing a threat to the welfare of the country while doing so,” Cecil adds.

“While governing unconstitutionally—”

“That would be my definition of a soft coup,” says Cecil.

“A rightful coup.”

“A righteous coup.”

That we’ve arrived at a time in history where reasonable people, and I do believe that Cecil and I are both reasonable people, born and bred in the language of democracy with its rule of law not martial law, sit over breakfast, idly chatting about soft coups, rightful coups, righteous coups, suggests that maybe we’ve been lax in our defense of our political values for a little while now. We’ve been civically napping. Become complacent in an assured inevitability of the cause.

“I’m not sure, Barnaby,” Cecil says looking up from his plate, “just what all the fuss has been about guacamole.”

Or perhaps, it’s just a passing concern.