The Age Old Struggle Between Winners And Losers

From Sea to Shining Sea ^ | 2/27/08 | Purple Mountains

[PurpleMountains]

Winners work and save and plan – and somehow manage to overcome the vagaries and pitfalls of life; losers do not. Through bad luck or a lack of discipline, losers fall through the cracks.

Throughout the ages there have always been winners and losers, and there have always been hugely more losers than winners. Dictators have used this to focus the hatred of the losers on scapegoats to gain and keep power – Hitler and the Jews; Mugabe and the white farmers; Stalin and the bourgeois farmers, for example. In democracies, political opportunists scapegoat the winners to gain power – usually by offering the losers the keys to the public treasury.

[Jack Hammer]

Reminds me of an old, old story:

The Ant and the Grasshopper-The 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 he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed, while the grasshopper has no food or shelter and must suffer through the winter.

The Ant and the Grasshopper-The 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 he’s 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, and ABC show up to film the shivering grasshopper, pictures of which are shown on the evening news juxtaposed against a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table piled high with food.

America is stunned by the contrast; how can it be, that, in a country of such wealth, the 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.

Michael Moore makes a “documentary” which strings together newsreels (slightly “edited”), footage of old interviews (also slightly “edited”) and a great deal of personal commentary to charge that the ant is a criminal whose outrages are exceeded only by the late Idi Amin Dada and Pol Pot. The documentary is shown at the Cannes Film Festival, where it wins the coveted Palme d’Or from a panel of judges composed almost exclusively of French existentialist grasshoppers.

Tom Daschle and John Kerry exclaim in an interview with Peter Jennings 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 and Anti-Ant Act,” retroactive to the beginning of the summer, in consequence of which 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 whom Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare recipients.

The ant loses the case, a fact loudly reported and much applauded by the Boston Globe. 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 care to maintain it.

Finally, the ant has disappeared in the snow while 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.

Meanwhile, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, and V.I. Lenin smile up from hell and occasionally, late at night, the sound of laughter can be heard emanating from the statue of George Orwell erected at his alma mater.

There’s a certain irony in there somewhere...