[cstreit]

Aesop version:


IN a field one summer’s day a Grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart’s content. An Ant passed by, bearing along with great toil an ear of corn he was taking to the nest.

“Why not come and chat with me,” said the Grasshopper, “instead of toiling and moiling in that way?”

“I am helping to lay up food for the winter,” said the Ant, “and recommend you to do the same.”

“Why bother about winter?” said the Grasshopper; “we have got plenty of food at present.” But the Ant went on its way and continued its toil. When the winter came the Grasshopper had no food, and found itself dying of hunger, while it saw the ants distributing every day corn and grain from the stores they had collected in the summer. Then the Grasshopper knew: “IT IS BEST TO PREPARE FOR THE DAYS OF NECESSITY.”


Modern Version:

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 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 NAAGB (The National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on Nightline and charges the ant with "green bias" and claims 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, or as Bill refers to it, the "Temperatures of the 80's."
- 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.

Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grass- hopper 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 moms who can only hear cases on Thursday's between 1:30 and 3pm when there are no talk shows scheduled. The ant loses the case. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left with which to pay these retroactive taxes, the Government confiscates his home and gives it to the Grasshopper.

As the story ends we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the ant's house crumbles around him since he doesn't bother to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. On the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's furniture, they are showing Bill Clinton standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.