OLD 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.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!
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.
Tom Daschle & John Kerry exclaim in an interview with Peter
Jennings 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 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.
