ORIGINAL 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 AMERICAN
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, CNN 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 it be that, in a country of such
wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
* Then a
representative of the NAGB (The National Association of Green Bugs) shows up
on nightline and charges the ant with green bias, and makes the case that the
grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism.
* Kermit
the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he
sings "It's not easy being green."
* Bill and Hillary Clinton make a
special guest appearance on the CBS Evening News to tell a concerned Dan
Rather that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been
denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the
Reagan summers.
* Richard Gephardt 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 EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and
Anti-Greenism 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.
* 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's in, which just happens to be the ant's old house,
crumbles around him since he doesn't know how to maintain it. The ant has
disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by
selling most of the ant's food, they are showing Bill Clinton standing before
a wildly applauding group of Democrats and disdained Republicans announcing
that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.
[Mother Shiptons Prophecy] [Poetry]
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