I was going through a mid-month crisis. I had a deadline to meet but the muse I count on to inspire me had gone AWOL. I find it hard to be amusing when I’m museless. Maybe I could just add a few wrinkles to something I’ve written before. No, I couldn’t do that. My conscience would gnaw at me. It would be immoral.
Immoral! That gives me an idea! Why don’t I write something about morals? No, not a sermon — something more like a fable.
Maybe I could borrow something from Aesop. He was pretty good at that sort of thing. I could take a fable that he wrote for the ancient Greeks and update it to reflect today’s standards of morality in the USA. Maybe I could update The Fox and the Grapes. A fox sees a bunch of grapes dangling on a vine a few feet above his head. He’s hungry and he wants those grapes but he doesn’t have a stepladder and he can’t jump up high enough to reach them. So, to cope with his frustration, he decides that they were probably sour anyway. I guess the moral is that if you can’t get what you want, convince yourself that it wasn’t really worth wanting. I don’t know how that would play these days — today’s fox would probably start a riot and set fire to the vineyard.
I do think that I might be able to do something with The Ants and the Grasshopper. I could even give it a little more zip by tossing in familiar characters from one or two other sources.
I’m sure everyone remembers what The Ants and the Grasshopper is all about but, just in case they don’t, here’s the Library of Congress version.
“One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.
“What!” cried the Ants in surprise. “Haven’t you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?”
“I didn’t have time to store up any food,” whined the Grasshopper; “I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone.”
The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust.
“Making music, were you?” they cried. “Very well; now dance!” And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work.
In my updated version the Grasshopper could be an aging rapper using the handle E-Z Duzzit. His agent can no longer get him paying gigs and his posse, one by one, has deserted him. He’s undernourished because he swaps most of his food stamps for Jamaican weed. When hunger pangs overwhelm him, and finding no soup kitchen within hopping distance, he approaches the Ants for a handout. When the Ants turn a deaf ear to his pleas and tell him to get a real job the Grasshopper resorts to subterfuge. He sends the Ants an email from a fictitious web address telling them they have won a sack of sugar in the Entomological Sweepstakes; all they have to do to claim their prize is to send a bushel of grain to a specified Post Office box to cover the cost of shipping and processing. The Ants, who had been suckered once before by a Nigerian cricket, don’t bite; the email winds up in their Spam folder.
The Grasshopper is devious as well as determined. He goes on CNN and accuses the Ants of being racists who want to let him starve solely because he is green. A Flamingo, a recent grad of Wonderland U. Law School, sees an opportunity for headlines that could give his fledgling practice a shot in the wing and offers to represent the Grasshopper in court, pro bono. The only attorney the Ants, who are short on cash, can afford to pay for his services is the village drunk, a Dormouse who wants the trial to be over quickly, whatever the verdict, so he can get back to partying with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare.
As a witness for the plaintiff the Flamingo calls to the stand Kermit the Frog, whose tuneful testimony describes how difficult it is to be green. The Dormouse calls, as an expert witness, the Queen of Hearts because he knows she won’t be intimidated by the prosecution. She resents the Flamingo questioning her qualifications, threatens to use him as a croquet mallet and to have everyone else in the courtroom decapitated. Before she can follow through on any of her threats she is cited for contempt and led away in lace cuffs.
After only a few minutes of deliberation the judge rules that since the Ants only gathered the grain — they neither planted nor watered it — they have no more right to it than does the Grasshopper. In fact, he adds, the Grasshopper has an even stronger claim to it because, due to his greater bulk, his need for nourishment exceeds theirs. The judge awards the Grasshopper 60% of the Ants’ assets as his due, then tacks on another 20% for pain and suffering.
The court’s decision is heralded on the front page of all the leading newspapers except for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post and lauded on all the talk shows with the exception of those on Fox. The Grasshopper, who has become an instant celebrity, gets a gig on the Tonight show, although most of his lyrics get bleeped, and is invited to appear as a guest on The View, where the panelists all fawn over him and diss the Ants as insensitive little buggers. Shortly thereafter, the IRS audits the Ants’ tax returns for the past ten years and the Senate launches an investigation into their assets to determine if they’ve avoided paying their fair share by socking away some grain in Swiss silos.
Yes, this seemed like a good idea when it first occurred to me but now, as I reevaluate it, I realize that some readers might mistakenly perceive it to be political commentary of one sort or another. Nothing could be further from the truth, so help me Aesop.
L. Allen Appel is 87 and lives in Monroe. He has been writing a column for his community newspaper for 17 years and is currently copy editor of that publication.
