The Ant and the Grasshopper

ORIGINAL VERSION:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building
his house and laying in 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 in 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 had 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.