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 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 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 grass-hopper is allowed to suffer so? Then a representative of the NAGB (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. 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 hearing officers that Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursday's between 1:30 and 3:00 PM. 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 Howard Dean standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.
Another grasshopper wanted to work but the ants already owned all the land, because their ancestors had taken it by force from some other animals years ago, and there was nowhere for the grasshopper to go to gather food of his own. So he had to take a job working for the ants, since the ants are above doing any of their own storage of food for the winter. But unfortunately, the ants didn't like the way he looked so they wouldn't hire him. Another grasshopper was lucky enough to get hired, but his pay was so low he could still barely feed himself, while meanwhile the ants were eating steak. Then the grasshopper got sick and couldn't afford a doctor to fix him up. He asked the government for help and so they set him up on welfare. The most he will ever receive is $1k a month, for a maximum of five years. By comparrison, an ant whose brother happened to be the president ant and whose father also used to be the president was once the director of a savings in loan. he screwed up, some would argue criminally, but yet the government stepped in to bail him out at the tune of $1.6bil. This ant had another brother who defaulted on a $4.56 million loan from Broward Federal Savings in Sunrise, Florida. After federal regulators closed the S&L, the office building that that this ant used the $4.56 million to finance was reappraised by the regulators at* $500,000, which the ant and his partners paid. The taxpayers had to pay back the remaining 4 million plus dollars. This ant is now the governor of Florida. But yet the ants still think they are getting the raw end of the deal. Many of us started out as grasshoppers and we have succeeded despite these disadvantage built into the marketplace, but on average, grasshoppers will always be less successful than the ants because of the way the playing field is set up (after all, the success of the ants depends on the desperation of the grasshoppers) and the overwhelming greed of the ants.
The grasshopper is a liar. We already know that he spent the winter in warm, sunny South Africa watching the car races. http://ferrarichat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8379
