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 back of the
grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his
"fair share".
Finally, the EOC 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.