A modest proposal

Don’t you wish we could have a bloodless coup every now and then? I know I do. You know, nothing big, just a little forced reorganization at gunpoint every once in a while to keep all the politicians on their toes and keep things interesting.

And who better to learn it from than Thailand? This is a country that has finely honed the art of the military coup through years of practice, conducting 18 of them over the past 74 years. In fact, coups are so commonplace and well-rehearsed that no one had to even fire a shot this time!

In Thailand, the coup has become an integral part of the political process. Take Tuesday’s coup: their current Prime Minister/Telecommunications Mogul, Thaksin Shinawatra, had been accused of corruption in several forms, including dodging taxes and manipulating elections. (Sound familiar? Thaksin’s involved in a court case too.)

Once Thaksin was found to be an all-around bad guy and able to use elections to his advantage, an unbiased third party (a.k.a. the Thai military) decided it was time to overthrow him. After that, the coup got underway: they waited until the Prime Minister left the country for a visit to the United Nations, then simply enacted martial law and allowed the Thai people to go about their daily lives. They even called a bank holiday to seal the deal!

So why don’t we take a page from the Thai political process book and try having a coup? The United States certainly has all the warning signs the Thais did: we’ve got corruption in the government and our President is popular in the countryside but extremely unpopular in the cities. All we need is an empowered army general and a king for him to hide his actions behind!

A coup wouldn’t cause too much disruption to your daily life, except for a lack of CNN and other television news for a while, plus all the good parking spots would be taken by tanks or Humvees. But you would get the day off, and the military could have a new President installed in two weeks, and a new constitution in a year. At that cost, who wouldn’t want our government to get a little revamping by a select, powerful few?

So next time you see the news and are unhappy with the way things are working out in Washington or how your candidate doesn’t win the election this November, remember that there is a way to fix all of it: the bloodless coup. It just worked for Thailand, and Thai reactions from it have been overwhelmingly positive. Their interim leaders are promising sweeping reforms and a new constitution in a year when it took our founding fathers two years to make ours. Why don’t we leave our next draft in the capable hands of the military? What could possibly go wrong?