CLASSIC VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building
his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and 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 out in the cold.
MODERN VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building
his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and 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 and ABC 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 everybody
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 to God for the grasshopper's sake.
Al Gore exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has
gotten
rich off the backof the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike
on
the ant to make him pay his "fair share".
Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity 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 and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is
confiscated by the government.
Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a
defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of
federal judges that Bill 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 he is in, which just happens
to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he doesn't maintain
it.
The ant has disappeared in the snow.
The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the
house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize
the once peaceful neighborhood
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