I recently received this clever story and immediately thought about its application to our exposition on chivalry.
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: Those without wisdom and chivalry have a brief day in the annals of history but soon suffer ignominy because of it.
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 allowed to 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 & John Kerry 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.
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 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.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Those who wisely build up their storehouse of chivalry are only taken advantage of in the end and are but...chivalry in the wind...
5 comments:
I have to say that the application of this allegory to chivalry is somewhat spurious in my opinion.
Also, when it comes down to it, real ants are socialists.
Yes, it is spurious, as you put it. The allegory is supposed to be satirical and reflect the sad state that our society and government has reached. The original morals to the stories were: 1)Be responsible for yourself! and 2)Be careful how you vote.
My dear Mr. Prufrock, don't you know that not all ants are red?
Well, let's not shroud our political diatribes within the blanket of chivalry---unless, of course, they actually pertain to chivalry.
Ah, that is the point exactly! Our present precarious political state is but one of the many fetid, cancerous outgrowths from the wound that has been created from the amputation of chivalry from our society.
Your point feels forced, and it's a bit of a stretch. So a stretched point becomes a thin line, and the further you stretch it, the thinner it gets and the easier it snaps and hits you in the eye and leaves you blind and pointless.
Game, set, match. Touchdown. Three-pointer at the buzzer to win. And I would like fries with that.
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