THE
ANT
AND
THE
GRASSHOPPER
This
one is a little different... . Two Different
Versions.... .......... .... Two Different
Morals
OLD
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
the ant is 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 and the rain all
summer long, building his house and laying up
supplies for the winter.
The
grasshopper
thinks the
ant is 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 he is cold
and starving.
CBS, NBC , PBS,
CNN, 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.'
ACORN
stages a
demonstration in front of the
ant's house
where the news stations film the group singing,
“We
shall overcome.”
Then
Rev.
Jeremiah Wright has the
group kneel down to pray to God for the
grasshopper's
sake.
President
Obama
condemns the ant
and blames President
Bush, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus,
and the Pope for
the grasshopper's
plight.
Nancy
Pelosi & Harry
Reid
exclaim in an interview with
Larry
King
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 & 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
Green
Czar
and given to the
grasshopper.
The
story ends as we see the
grasshopper
and
his free-loading friends finishing up the last
bits of the ant’s
food
while the government house he is in, which, as
you recall, just happens to be the
ant's
old
house, crumbles around them because the
grasshopper
doesn't maintain it.
The
ant
has
disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.
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 ramshackle, once prosperous and
once peaceful, neighborhood.
The entire
Nation
collapses
bringing the rest of the free world with
it.
MORAL
OF THE STORY:
Be
careful how you vote in
2010. I’ve
sent this to you because I believe that you are
an ant
– not a grasshopper!
Make sure that you pass this on to other
ants.
Don’t bother sending it on to any
grasshoppers
because
they wouldn’t understand it,
anyway.
I wish I'd written this! z
|
35 comments:
Good one!
At the moment, my composition class is working on writing satire, often of the political sort because many of my students take a keen interest in politics. If I can find a way to work this "new" fable into the curriculum, I will.
I wish I had written this too.
Me, too! Me, too! But I'll do the next best thing and steal it. (Ooo. Does that make me too much like the grasshopper?)
I'll just link to it, instead.
Cool. Let’s cut the budget somewhere to pay for bouncing the rubble around in Afghanistan for another ten years.
Very good. In the Fables de la Fontaine, the grasshoper is a cicada.
Sure ducky. Lets start with the nonsensical Reid/Pelosi proposed $1 trillion taxpayer subsidy to private health insurance plans so as to reduce ever increasing health care costs legislation currently winding its' way through the Senate.
I've always enjoyed that. My brother sent me a version written for California some years back and it was a real hoot.
Thanks Farmer, you're always a friend.
Exactly, this so called reform is nothing more than the standard giveaway to the corporate grasshopper. I think it's a travesty but Kapital does love to laugh at the peeps and their pithy little stories.
I doubt he'll be able to steal as much as Chucklenuts' crew did but this bunch has chops.
Humor is only funny if there's truth to it. There's truth to this.
Ducky: your rubble-ized Mr Obama at work.
BZ
Oh Zeppelin, behave. It's KAPITAL at work. Doesn't have squat to do with Dem or Rep.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss and thanks for helping the nation maintain this destructive rut.
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I can't wait til Chuck see this. Oh my:)
Always..I sure wish you were teaching a class in American contemporary history or politics! I know you'll get this in there, anyway.
Tom...thinking of you and wishing the best.
Joe, link away!
Ducky...isn't it bizarre that our president has justified sending more into Afghanistan with how important it is and how it's important for the whole world, but SOMEHOW, he's figuring it won't be QUITE as important to stop terrorism in 2011? fancy that.
As far as 'destructive rut'..we'll do ANYTHING, Or most Americans will, to protect our country.
Frogburger...tres bien!
Hermit: Lay off CALIFORNIA :-) heh heh
FJ..I'm surprised we're not providing Afghanistan with health insurance.
But,honestly, folks...I think some wisdom is in the suggestion that the afghan tribes will go anywhere their camel's saddled......
Like Palestinians in love with terrorists like Hezbollah because THEY give them money!
I swear, I think if we went into villages...closed down the poppy business as well as possible (heck, we can barely control pot coming into America yet, and are even selling it in boutiques)!, anyway...if we sent in 1000 doctors, medical units, small business start-ups, better teachers, and taught the Afghans this kind of thing, we could win.
HEY! LET'S SEND THE PEACE CORPS IN, WHAT DO YOU THINK?
A friend's VERY leftwinger grandson is in Africa with the Peace Corps. He went into ZIMBABWE...and just can't BELIEVE everyone there isn't NICE :-) Suddenly, he left there and is working in Uganda...he is ONE DISILLUSIONED LITTLE LEFTIE, let me tell you. They aren't liking what he's doing, they're not sucking up to this American who brings goodies...they're really not desirous of much change because their governments scare them into subservance! Chris is so surprised!! (are you?)
But, I DO think my idea works.
(How does one spell subservance? my red line's showing :-(
z, 9/11 was planned in Germany.
Why doesn't he bomb the crap out of Berlin and firebomb Dresden again?
Afghanistan is one hell of a place to try to establish an imperialist outpost. Never been done and we sure can't do it either.
But President Empty Suit must indulge right wing America's sense of invulnerability and religious mission. So get ready to pay, in a lot of ways. Train in the tunnel, bill coming due.
mr ducky,
The train may be in the tunnel, but NOTHING prevents Congress from continually re-routing the tunnel's exit location.
The Democrat's last "new deal" express-train boondoggle is up to $74 trillion, and is STILL counting.
So please, no more "Chucklenuts" cracks. Bush is a small fry penny-ante mom & pop train conductor when compared to FDR.
And Ducky, do you think those were Germans of Germanic descent or do ya THINK they just might have come from training camps in Iraq or Afghanistan?
And, wait a minute..I thought you were always pinning Conservatives with feeling too vulnerable. What's the change for, just to support your comment?
Very good. A cautionary tale for our time.
Democrats keep writing ever bigger new entitlement checks and then they go around blaming "big kapital" for its' inability to keep on cashing them. Go figure.
And Ducky, do you think those were Germans of Germanic descent or do ya THINK they just might have come from training camps in Iraq or Afghanistan?
--------------------
Who cares. The planning was done in Germany, torch the joint.
Think, Ducky, THINK.
Think, Ducky, THINK.
C'mon now, Z. Ducky has told you many times that he's a leftist.
You might as well be yelling at a fire hydrant to skip a jumprope.
Ducky thinking? You're an optimist, Z.
z said "A friend's VERY leftwinger grandson is in Africa with the Peace Corps. He went into ZIMBABWE...and just can't BELIEVE everyone there isn't NICE :-) Suddenly, he left there and is working in Uganda...he is ONE DISILLUSIONED LITTLE LEFTIE, let me tell you."
remember my tale of 'holly' who took her own life last year? this is her story too - she couldn't get over the fact that there really is evil in the world and she'd been lied to all those years.
i love this parable - the old one and the new one. have you seen the new "little red hen" yet?
p.s. z: you didn't seriously ask ducky to THINK did you?
Makes me long for the taste of FRENCH-FRIED GRASSHOPPERS once again.
They make wonderful hors d'oeuvres at cocktail parties.
~ FreeThinke
Any comment on the research showing that foreclosures are highest in the areas of the country that preach the "Prosperity Gospel" including revelations that a large percentage of ministers of this gospel are also loan officers?
Now I don't want to suggest that our problems were caused by good solid "ant like" Protestants. Surely, poor, largely minority, Americans were responsible for all our woes but it's something to consider.
Non sequitur is but one of many flavors of Ducky's imbecility.
Ducky, you ever consider it's where jobs are least secure?
what research duhkkky? care to provide a link?
not that I would defend the prosperity gospel...God is NOT a cosmic bell hop
beamish...we all know duhkkky is the king of red herrings...
he's too yella to start his own blog so he starts posts on others
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2009/11/did-prosperity-gospel-cause-housing.html
-------------------
Start here elmo. Her book should be out soon. Seems well researched.
Pitch till you win.
research? that article never connected the dots between the two. It was a cobble of commentary.
Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending
it didn't seem to make the connection between the two. It didn't even try to give numbers to how many of these parishoners had even defaulted on their mortgages.
Here's what I got out of it.
My cat has blue eyes.
My brother has blue eyes.
Therefore my brother is a cat.
simple logical fallacy type stuff duhkkky.
there was no mention of
pastors who are shady mortgage brokers? how many were pastors? It mentioned without giving specifics that there were seminars given
what's the definition of shady? how many of these guys were indicted or even arrested for being 'shady'?
C'mon duhkkky.
I'm can't stand Joel Osteen or any of those prosperity teachers but that blog post was a weak argument.
the other article mentions one sleezebag name Garay and one of his parishioners. We're never really given an idea of how widespread it is. I hate those prosperity pastors but those two articles take a few cases and make quite a large assumption.
Well elmo, it's certainly true that the Atlantic article isn't definitive.
But it has good content and it's more to counteract the simpletons on the right who parrot "CRA, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank" and utterly dishonest crap about "the government forcing banks to make loans to people who can't repay them".
I wouldn't say that bringing a "wealth coach" in who is kicking back to these vulgar preachers has anything to do with government force. Rather they are much more indicative of the behavior generated by Greenspan's "free money" and the abuses that were widespread in the industry. Even among the "ants".
it's not even close to definitive, mostly inuendo and logical fallacies.
I won't spend a lot of time defending those guys because I can't stand them myself but those articles didn't even come close to making a connection.
Their brother is a cat.
Elbro,
Ducky's sense of "logic" goes more like this:
God is love
Love is blind
Ray Charles is blind
Ray Charles is God
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