The Ant & The Grasshopper

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.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

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, 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 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.

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Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left. - F.A. Hayek

Where have all the Conservatives Gone?

There is always hope, as long as one can think.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.- Thomas Jefferson

Did you make that up, rockyreagan? That is brilliant. Now what would our fables be like if Howard Dean re-wrote them?

I know that in the world of partisan politics and with the people that inhabit it, that everything is black or white, left or right, Republican or Democrat and that the concept of a middle ground or a gray area or exceptions to the rule can be difficult to understand, but please try.

Not all people are poor because they did not work, not everyone is poor because of the things they have done and many who are poor actively try to improve their situation every day. Remember that few rules have absolutely no exception.

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It's the difference between suicide and slow capitulation... - Jim Morrison

I know that, Doctiloquus. Remember, I'm the one who knows a number of transients, most of whom are far from lazy. What I found so amusing was the satire of bureaucratic inefficiency, which doesn't help the poor.

I wasn't talking to you. I pressumed you would know what I said.

__________________
It's the difference between suicide and slow capitulation... - Jim Morrison

The grasshopper, who inherited the world's largest anthills, plays all summer long while the ants do all his work for him. When the winter comes, something terrible happens.
"Oh my," he says, looking out his window, "There are some ants that are not doing work and starving to death and making life less pleasant for me." He fails to see the connection between his downsizing the anthill, the natural food cycle, and other issues in affecting the ants.
Though many of the ants have broken limbs and cannot work, many more ants are elderly, some ants are seeking work but not having any luck, and a very large group of ants are taking up two jobs and still barely able to keep their larvae fed, Grasshopper cannot bear to see. If he did look at these ants, he would feel the need to do something like rally for government aid, make the charities he owns more efficient, or god forbid cut into his own wealth to upsize the anthill, provide specialized training for out of work ants, or at least do something other than dance on his yacht all day.
So he turns his attention to the dung beetles that scavenge off what the ants lose in corporate and bureaucratic inefficiency. Rather than focusing on how these dung beetles could become more productive with better education and training and some aid to their families, he focuses on how they take at the expense of ants. And he bunches in a bunch of other ants with them: the disabled, elderly, out of luck ants. And he rallies the other ants, even those that work two jobs and still scavenge with dung beetles against this menace. The poor hard-working ants find themselves lumped in as well by the middle-class ants, most of whom have jobs sorting food rather than seeking it out.
"Bureaucracy is to blame," he states, and there is some truth to this, but what he ignores is that he himself is not going to lift an antenna to do a (*)(*)(*)(*) thing and thus is a rather shabby alternative to bureaucracy. But most of the ants are either uneducated, stressed out, or looking for an outlet. What they have in common is that they're all angry and they are all grateful to Grasshopper for providing a place for them to shed their anger.
Fast-forward twenty years later: Most of the ants are starving, all other than those who are right by the grasshopper's side in cushy positions. Now they're angry. At this point, the Weevils that are in charge of the government decide there is little choice but to initiate socialist intervention programs to avoid a Communist revolution. Grasshopper is mad about this, but glad that at least he isn't going to be killed.
He thinks back. Perhaps if he had tried to fix the problem by seeing the poor as living ants and that all bugs have some level of responsibility for the whole and to aid one another, he could have found a better way to fix the problems of inefficient bureaucracy and help the poor, and then bureaucracy wouldn't have made a huge comeback with popular support. Nah. That would have required him voluntarily giving up something, giving up his elitist views of superiority over dung beetles and ants, delegitimized the things he did to make profit at expense to the anthill, and been a real pain in the thorax. And besides, it's no real skin off his back whether there is bureaucracy or not. It seems he has to deal with the unpleasancy of seeing death and hearing complaints regardless of whether corporations or bureaucracy is at a point of strength. It's good to be a grasshopper.
Then he was eaten by a big, hairy spider.

This too is exaggerated (it is a fable) but I think it is a good balance against Rocky's fable. Note that the real trouble isn't necessarily Grasshopper's corporate interests, but his propaganda technique that involves dehumanizing the poorest among us and turning ants on one another (stories like Rocky's in other words). The spider wasn't necessary, I guess, but it needed more violence and justice to make it as an American movie.

Does anyone know whether ants are monogamous or polygamous? How about grasshoppers? Are they monogamous or polygamous? Surely, if we knew of their habits in that regard, that could tell us some all-important something about why they are successes or failures, shouldn't it?

I have another version, one that includes a third and ruling class known as the "parasites". As in JavaBlack's version, the ants are struggling and poor and the grasshoppers are wealthy. The parasites rule over both, however. The ants want to become wealthy like the grasshoppers, and both the ants and the grasshoppers want to improve the overall standard of living. However, because of parasitic debt, the real values of both anthills and whatever it is that grasshoppers live in have decreased. The parasites split into two groups. The first group, known as elephantine parasites, wants to cut taxes on grasshopper property- but by doing so they cause parasitic debt to increase, thus negating the potential fiscal incentive for the ants and keeping them poor. The second group, known scientifically as parasiticus spendicus, promises to help the ants by any means necessary, but begins by decreasing the ants' incentive to become wealthy by raising taxes on the grasshoppers. Then they increase the parasitic debt by spending more, negating any remaining possibility of alleviating ant poverty. So in the end, the overall invertebrate economy suffers, grasshoppers have to move into the anthills and ants are left homeless. Meanwhile, the parasites seize the luxurious property that the grasshoppers left behind and the two kinds of parasites become wealthy while arguing about who is more corrupt.