Mama Goose returns to the BIRCHES

Another new version of the ant story:

Ant works hard all summer long, building a house and laying up supplies for the winter. He takes grass stalks from the yards of his neighbors, the crickets, who are much too polite to protest, and he fashions them into a lovely nest below ground. He finds that he can slip into the worm holes and take away the moist earth from the tunnels of the worms who are too languid to resist. He recruits small mites to carry the worms' mud under ground to pack around the interior of his nest to make it warm and safe. Then he kills the mites and stores them with his food larder.

Ant slips into the home across the yard and carries off the granules of sugar he finds in the people's sugar bowl. He eats some right there in the house, and shits on the table. He gets into the corn flakes box and chews up some tender morsels, leaving the rest exposed to summer humidity through the holes he has opened in the wrapping.

Then he goes off to the surrounding ant hills and tells all the others where to find some supplies for the winter. Soon, there is an army of ants parading into the home across the yard, carrying off the sugar, the flakes, the honey, and the chocolate.

MEANWHILE: Grasshopper thinks the ant is a criminal. He disdains the thievery. He laughs and dances and plays the summer away, sawing on the fiddle his father left him.

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. Grasshopper writes a folksy melody and some clever protest words which he plays and sings. This tends to make bystanders gather to applaud and harmonize and generally make loud merriment.

Alarmed, Ant calls the police. The police come and threaten Grasshopper with arrest for posing a clear and present danger to the tranquility of the community. They confiscate his fiddle because he has broken the noise curfew. The Anttolic priest appears and tells Grasshopper that coveting his neighbor's sugar is a sin. The local Republican Ant Party sends a lawyer to represent Ant. The lawyer explains that grasshoppers are notoriously communistic and unable to appreciate the entrepreneurialism of ants. If they had any ambition and honesty, grasshoppers would go out and swipe stuff, too.

Rush Antbaugh rants daily on his antennas about the decline of society. The Grasshoppers, he says, are destroying the fabric of society by expecting to be handed everything on a platter. They are different from the ants, because the ants earned what they have.


CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering Grasshopper. They knock on Ant's doors and repeatedly try to call him on the phone. But, the enterprising little ant has no reply. He has flown off to Aruba for the winter, catching a free flight on the back of an unsuspecting robin. He leaves his home and larder to sit peacefully, in storage, under the ground.

Meanwhile, Grasshopper starves to death.

MORAL OF THE STORY: In a purely capitalistic society, it does not pay to make music for free. Always charge! Plenty!