Subject: THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

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, 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"
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 s "Temperatures of the 80's."

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.

AI 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-Ant 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 who can only hear
cases on Thursday's between 1 :30 and 3:00 PM when
there are no talk shows scheduled. 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 since he doesn't 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.

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.

Fireball