CDR: The Ant and the Grasshopper, Election Version

[Tim May]

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]






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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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