In perspective...
Now think on this:
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
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 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, 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.
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 moms who can only hear cases on Thursday's
between
1:30 and 3pm when there are not talk shows scheduled. 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
announcing
that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.
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