The Ant and the Grasshopper, Election Version Original 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 grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold. Da Hoppers in Da 'Hood The ants work hard to make their businesses prosperous, their farms productive. They save and invest and educate their children. The grasshoppers party all summer, hangin' out with the homeys, struttin' on the beaches, and figurin' that Massah Bill Clintonhopper in the Big White Plantation House will keep on sending dat federal welfare money to Florida to keep the crack pipes full. To a Grasshopper-American, it's all obvious: Why work when government is there? Why save when Hillary is promising to raise taxes on the ants? Hard work is for suckers, or, as they say, suckas. Besides, Albert Gorehopper invented the Internet. Ironically, the hard-working ants make use of the Internet, but the crack-smoking hopheads say that "books are for whitey." Better yet, to the grasshoppers, the top Demohoppers have made it their top campaign pledge to take away the guns of the ants. (The Hopper Bloods and Crips get a good laugh out of this one, as they know the hopper gangbangers will still have their Uzis and AKs.) Winter arrives, and the Demohoppers have made their final promises to the crack-dealing, Bingo-playing, welfare-taking grasshoppers of Florida. The ants are wary, fearing what the grasshoppers will do in the name of "democratic fairness." The ants appear to have won the vote, but the Demohoppers in Palm Beach County claim that some butterflies confused them and that they want a "do over." Hopper Jesse Jackson, who once called New York City "Hymietown," has made a new alliance with the "Judenhoppers" of affluent Palm Beach. He calls in Al Sharpton, Alan Dershowitz, and Tawana Brawley to help his Hopper Crusade. He threatens a war between the ants and the grasshoppers unless the hoppers get as many chances to vote and re-vote and fiddle with the ballots as they need to let Albert Gorehopper win. The grasshopper strategy is to take the counties which were most heavily infested with grasshoppers and then do a "manual count" to find more votes which the neutral machines had rejected because they were incorrectly punched, or double punched, or had chads hanging. The grasshoppers have been told that, from basic statistics, this biased re-counting will ensure that Albert Gorehopper gets enough extra votes to win. The ants say that this is a theft of the election and that the grasshoppers just want more handouts from the hopheads in Hopperton, D.C., and, besides, if the grasshoppers had bothered to learn how to read and weren't smoking so much crack they'd've had no problems with butterflies. The Chief Grasshopper sends his team of lawyerlocusts, close relatives of grasshoppers, into Florida. The ants try to block a recount in hopper havens like Broward, Palm, and Volushia. The Grasshopper-Americans scream dat dis be racist! The promised war begins and the ants kill all the grasshoppers. No longer will the grasshoppers use the "democratic process" to take the food the ants had worked so hard for. Life is once again good. [Note: I wrote everything here except the "Original." I mention this because it is routine for people to pass around various versions of the "Ant and the Grasshopper" without indicating who wrote which parts. So, Tim May wrote all but the opening set-up paragraph. Tim May, 11-13-2000] -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.