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 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-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.