THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER
THE ORIGINAL VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long building his house and laying in supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks he is a fool, and laughs, dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies in the cold.
THE MODERN VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long building his house and laying in supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he is a fool, and laughs, dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.
CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be that in a country of such wealth this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everyone cries when they sing "It's Not Easy Being Green".
Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing "We Shall Overcome". Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray for the grasshopper's sake.
Al Gore exclaims, in an interview with Peter Jennings, that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him "pay his fair share".
The EEOC drafts the "Economic Equality and Anti-Grasshopper Act", retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs. Having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, the ant's home is confiscated by the government.
Hillary Clinton gets her law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant. The case is tried before a panel of Federal judges that Bill Clinton has appointed from a list of single parent welfare recipients. The ant loses the case.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food, while the government house that he's in, crumbles around him because he doesn't bother to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow.
Two weeks later, the grasshopper is found dead in a drug related
incident and the house, now a crack and whore house, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.