THE 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 this poor
shivering grasshopper. Next they go to 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 greenbugs) shows
up on Nightline and harges 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 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
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 greenbugs 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 announcing that a
new era of "fairness" has dawned in America!