The Ant and the Grasshopper in 1999

THE CLASSIC 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.

THE MODERN 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, CNN, NBC and ABC show up to provide pictures of the
shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his
comfortable home with a table filled with food.

America and the world 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 NAAGB (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 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, or as Bill refers to
it, the "Temperatures of the 80's."

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 was 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.

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 compatriots
announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.