ArcaMax

It's perfect coup weather.

President Donald Trump spoke before American generals, reminding them that they'll, by God, do what they're told or they'll, by God, lose the pension.

They endured a series of insults and left, not like prideful lions, but like civil servants scared of losing their jobs. Except for the medals on their chests, they might as well have been postal workers.

With American troops already in many of the cities most likely to rebel, or at least riot, and dark mutterings about "full force" and a government shutdown if Trump is gonna take the country, it's damn close to the moment. If he misses it, it's likely to never come again.

This is the time for a "strong man" to step in, suspend that liberal rag of a Constitution, impose martial law and restore order.

In the long shadow of all this, waiting for the other combat boot to drop, I sat in a diner with eight stools at the counter, three booths and four tables. There's a gas station across the street, and the gas station also sells used cars, and next door is a convenience store offering groceries, bongs, lottery tickets and a cheap brand of beer that comes in a clear plastic bottle, like apple juice.

It's been building to this moment for a while now, easily since the days when people started saying Obama was building concentration camps in the desert and dead children on the floor of a school were "crisis actors."

Trump didn't miss that moment. He stepped in at just the right time, a rich man with a model wife who wasn't afraid to nudge the country toward violence an inch at a time.

There's only one waitress in that diner, and she brought me my two over easy eggs, ham, white toast, fried potatoes and coffee. I asked for hot sauce. You don't eat eggs across the street from a bong and lottery ticket store without putting hot sauce on them.

The waitress brings her 3-year-old son to work. They're probably both on some kind of government health insurance because my $3 tip makes me one of the diner's most generous customers.

While the waitress was gone, her son got behind the counter, picked up a plastic squirt bottle of pancake syrup and handed it to me.

"He doesn't need that," his mother said when she came back. "He needs this."

She handed me the hot sauce bottle and took the kid back to the corner booth where he soon became occupied with a picture book and a slice of bacon.

If the coup comes, will it leave this spot alone, me, the waitress, the kid, the $5,495 used cars, the bongs? The neighborhood is majority white. That'll help. The city went narrowly for Trump last election, and that'll help, too.

But who will come boiling out of the neighborhood's vinyl-sided, multi-family houses to say goodbye to confusing, takes-too-long American democracy in favor of quick-as-a pistol-shot dictatorship? Who's gonna celebrate the end of decision-making and the death of opinion?

Who's gonna kneel when Christ comes back as a cop?

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.