Fw: the and and the grasshoper

["Brennon Davies" <brdavies@globalcenter.net>]

>
>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 a 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 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 conncerned 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 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 Bill Clinton standing before a wildly applauding group of 
>Democrats and Republicans announcing that a new era of "fairness" has 
>dawned in America.
>