This arrived in my email today from one of my friends in Canada:
THE CLASSIC 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 ant is warm and well fed. The shivering grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.
The End.
THE CANADIAN 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 ant is warm and well fed.
So far, so good, eh?
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 less fortunate, like him, are cold and starving.The CBC shows up to provide live coverage of the shivering grasshopper with cuts to a video of the ant in his comfortable warm home with a table laden with food.Canadians are stunned that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so while others have plenty.
The NDP, the CAW and the Coalition Against Poverty demonstrate in front of the ant's house. The CBC, interrupting an Inuit cultural festival special from Nunavut with breaking news, broadcasts them singing "We Shall Overcome."Svend Robinson rants in an interview with Pamela Wallin that the ant has gotten rich off the backs of grasshoppers, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share".
In response to polls, the Liberal Government drafts the Economic Equity and Grasshopper Anti-Discrimination Act, retroactive to the beginning of the summer.The ant's taxes are reassessed, and he is also fined for failing to hire grasshoppers as helpers.Without enough money to pay both the fine and his newly imposed retroactive taxes, the government confiscates his home.The ant moves to the US, and starts a successful agribiz company.
The CBC later shows the now fat grasshopper finishing up the last of the ant's food, though Spring is still months away, while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he hasn't bothered to maintain it.
Inadequate government funding is blamed, Roy Romanow is appointed to head a commission of enquiry that will cost $10,000,000.The grasshopper is soon dead of a drug overdose, the Toronto Star blames it on the obvious failure of government to address the root causes of despair arising from social inequity.
The abandoned house is taken over by a gang of immigrant spiders, praised by the government for enriching Canada's multicultural diversity, who promptly set up a marijuana grow op and terrorize the community.
The End.
Change the names and move it a few hundred miles south and it sounds an awful lot like Washington, DC.
ReplyDeleteYou might be right. But my sense is that the USA is a lot more right-wing ultra conservative in the past few years.
ReplyDeleteVery pro-war, anti-immigration, pro-business, anti-labor, pro-republican, anti-democrat.
So there is a lot less of this kind of liberalism tolerated in the US. In this country, the term 'Liberal' is used as an insult. I've noticed that in other countries, it is generally thought to mean "educated".
However, I do notice the pendulum may be swinging back from the right to the center again, with Bush falling into disfavor in recent months.
People are losing their apetit for war in Iraq, and losing their patience with Mr Bush and his team as president.