Ant and the Grasshopper By Jack Schitt
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 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 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 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 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 Dan Rather 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 Clinton 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