The American Way

The ant works hard in the heat all summer long, building his house and  laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper, by contrast, has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

Modern American Version

The ant works hard in the heat all summer long, building his house and  laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is 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 the video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How is it possible in a country of such wealth, that a poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer like this?

Next, a representative of the NAGB (national association of green bugs) appeared on Nightline and charged the ant with green bias. He 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 and he sings the song "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 exclaimed in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich by unfairly profiting from the grasshopper and calls for hearings.

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 enlists 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 Thursdays between 1330 and 1500. 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 living in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because the grasshopper lacks the means or motivation to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. On the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, Bill Clinton can be seen standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that new era of "fairness" has finally dawned in America.