June 2016, Updated August 2022
If some folk out there are correct and those who oppose them are not, then the Greek fabulist Aesop was wrong in a most embarrassing fashion in his 373rd fable (according to Perry Index) and arguably most famous story. Some ignorant people might accuse the Grasshopper of the 'Ant and the Grasshopper' fame of goofing during spring, summer, and autumn. And if this is so, then a major correction of a significant oversight is in order. No, not in order, but mandated by the circumstances. The grasshopper was starving during his fateful winter because the Ant had benefited from some formic privilege and not because the grasshopper wasted time all spring, summer, and autumn.
No further explanation will suffice, for no different answer is sufficiently explanatory. If everything mentioned above is correct, it is impossible that planning for the future, hard work, and a little luck sired the Ant's success. The grasshopper's inability to defer gratification is even more unlikely, possibly unlikeliest. Instead, it has to have been some playing out of that sordid invisible package of unearned assets bequeathed to ants and other Formicae but never to grasshoppers through the aforementioned Formic Privilege, which is to blame and attribute fault.
The Ant has formic privilege, and as a result, the grasshopper could not be. Still, anything other than destined to fail come winter, even if their summers were laden with music, song, and one assumes frolicking, merriment, and galivanting on the grasshoppers part until the proverbial dinner bill is due. Matters aren't improved much when we consider that grasshoppers usually live at most 12 months, while an ant, depending on its rank in its colony, can live twice or triple that of the grasshopper and his kind. And omnivorous ants usually eat herbivorous grasshoppers and not the other way round. With that in mind, the Ant's contempt for the grasshopper's alleged frivolity and shortsightedness seems less justified.
Had Aesop's particular played out closer to something like National Geographic, the ants wouldn't have turned their back on the grasshopper because he failed to prepare for winter. One of the ants would have talked to the grasshopper long enough to distract him while one or several of his buddies hit him in the back of his grasshopper head with a rock and collectively dragged the grasshopper's body back to some of the food they're storing up for winter.
Formic privilege? Perhaps there is such a thing, or perhaps not, but now I'm less confident at the end of this analysis than I was at the beginning. In some Montaigne-like fashion, I might have realized halfway that what I was arguing against, I am now converted to the converse position and arguing before. Or, at the very least, admitting that these waters are far murkier than I realized before I started wading through them.
Maybe the grasshopper is making music his entire summer, devoting less concern for the winter than he might have otherwise. Because, on some level, the grasshoppers know it's futile, considering their lifespans are so short and that autocratic, albeit functional, ant colonies probably collectively strip-mined much of the forest of anything that the grasshopper could have plausibly saved for winter. Assuming, of course, the grasshopper would have otherwise been so inclined. Playing music in the summer and autumn, much for the same reason the band in the movie Titanic (1997), based on a real-life incident on the doomed passenger liner, played music while the Titanic sank. Panic. Perhaps, but panic and concomitant behaviors represent only four out of the five stages of grief, while the fifth: Acceptance, caps it all off.
What else was the band going to do when their odds of survival were little, but the chance, nay opportunity, that they could go out on their own, self-defined terms was much and well worth taking. Rage against the dying of the light or play joyful songs, or at least songs that bring him joy playing until the sun sets during the twilight of the grasshopper's short life after all the grasshopper asked the ants for a bite to eat, not the whole grain. What if the ants had said sure and told the grasshopper the price? We might have a very different parable about a grasshopper playing music, getting hungry, and making a business transaction to buy a portion of the chaff, husk, or germ from the Ant's wheat or whatever. Or maybe he thought that because the ants got to listen to him play music, they should at least pay for it or give a donation, tantamount to payment, for the grasshopper's busk.
