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, ABC, and CNN 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." Then, Jesse has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake. In an interview with Peter Jennings, Tom Daschle and Walter Mondale exclaim that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call 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. Because he is left nothing with which 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. |
gosh, in the form of a children's fable, that's so refreshing. |
|
|
|
|