CLASSIC 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 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. Al Gore 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 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.

-- Ooops (Ooops@slipofthetongue.com), November 12, 2000

Answers

LOL!

-- CD (costavike@hotmail.com), November 12, 2000.

Classic!

-- I (h@ve.spoken), November 12, 2000.

Well I never! Some of my best friends are green and I take offence to this poorly disguised racist piece. It is about time for the hard working, over achieving, materialistic Ants to pay more attention to the grasshopperBs special needs.

-- Wizard (onedirector@email.msn.com), November 12, 2000.

The unspoken message in this is that there are no poor,starving ants and no well-fed, carefree grasshoppers - in other words, that one's station in life is a precise reflection of one's moral fiber and work ethic.

In Real Life (tm) you can work a 40 or 50 hour week at a minimum wage job, live in a slum because it is all you can afford, barely feed or clothe yourself and your kids, and attend church on Sundays to boot.

-- Brian McLaughlin (brianm@ims.com), November 12, 2000.

Brian:

You are of course perfectly correct. There are exceptions to nearly every trend, however overwhelming such a trend might be. There are uneducated people making more than some college graduates, there are preteens taller and heavier than some adults, and so on. The Real World (tm) is a messy place. Therefore, we should all understand that no generalization is valid, and all odds less than an observed 1.0 are worse than invalid, they are misleading.

Still, while the race doesn't always go to the swift, that's the way to bet.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), November 12, 2000.

Ah, yes, everything's black and white. Everything's so cut and dried, so easy to categorize, so transparent, when one views it from a lofty perch of perceived superiority. Funny how many of those on that perch do not seem to grasp the fact that the reality lies much closer to the middle; that more and more, the cut-n-dried lines of demarcation of old are being blurred.

"Compassionate Conservatism", anyone? Or was that merely a campaign slogan? To coin a phrase, "LOL".

-- Patricia (PatriciaS@lasvegas.com), November 12, 2000.

Patricia:

While the sky contains every color visible to our eyes, every one of which can be isolated by different means varying from rainbows to pinholes, it seems *useful* to characterize it as being "blue".

Aren't we allowed to laugh at those for whom a blue sky has negative political repercussions, so they need to deny it? *Especially* those who favor policies based on the sky NOT being blue, which have backfired time and again. Yet another case where perfect is the enemy of excellent. Ooops' story is excellent, not perfect.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), November 12, 2000.