The Ant and The Grasshopper

****TRADITIONAL 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 the ant is 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.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for
yourself!



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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 the ant is 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
warm and well fed
while others are cold and starving.

CBS, NBC, PBS, 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 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 grou p singing,
'We shall
overcome.' Jesse then has the group kneel
down to pray to God
for the grasshopper's sake.

Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry & Harry Reid
exclaim in an interview
with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the
back of the
grasshopper, and both call 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 Clinton 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 Clinton 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.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be very careful how
you vote in 2008