Old Fable, New Version

[souperdave]

There are two Versions.......


TRADITIONAL 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.




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 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 warm and well fed while others
are 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.

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.

Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, John Kerry & 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 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 Clinton 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 Clinton 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.

[Mr. Knowitall]

Well... it's partisan. If only it were funny.

[cdwjava]

It may be partisan, but it does have an exaggerated ring of truth to it.

- Carl

[Mr. Knowitall]

Where?

[blueeagle]

So very true.

[souperdave]

SATIRE

sat·ire
Pronunciation: \ˈsa-ˌtī(-ə)r\
[noun]

1 : a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly

[blueeagle]

Reminds me of this

[Mr. Knowitall]

I recognize the popular notion that it's "satire" to simply poke fun at something, particularly if you're vicious, regardless of your honesty or accuracy. It's a shame that the label is applied so carelessly and superficially, as true satire is an art. It seeks to highlight genuine problems and its goal is to inspire thought and change. Sorry, but the email forward provided above seeks to do neither.

[souperdave]

Soooooooooo, I would venture to guess that you don't think too highly of it?

[cdwjava]

Well. while there are likely many much more apt parables, or more clever satirical prose, the concept is one that frustrates many of us. I could post many TRUE tales of woe very similar to the "satire" posted at the outset.

When we live in a confiscatory state such that the tax rate drives businesses out of the state (high tech businesses can be very mobile - especially if they are simply web based firms ... quite a few have changed addresses to Nevada in the last few years), and makes it more profitable for high wage earners to retire and close businesses (my uncle closed his law firm years ago when he realized he would take home more in retirement), something is wrong. In CA there are said to be fewer and fewer wage earners to provide for a growing population of aid recipients. And most of these recipients that *I* see are more than capable of work. And when my neighbor gets new appliances every few years, subsidized rent, food assistance, and a smattering of other goodies to go with his big screen home theater system while I have to struggle to afford a pair of 30" TVs, and keep my appliances running on a wing and a prayer (we can't afford to replace them every couple of years) it can be kind of annoying.

The first two sentences of the following quote is oft-repeated ... I rather like the prescient warning associated with the latter sentences. While there is some dispute as to whether the quote was ever made anywhere by Tytler, and there was no book by Tytler regarding the fall of the Athenian Republic, the quote is still meaningful:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.

Alexander Tytler
(regarding the fall of the Athenian Republic)

- Carl