Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Vice President Gore: I fight for the chickens and I am fighting for the chickens right now. I will not give up on the chickens crossing the road! I will fight for the chickens and I will not disappoint them.

Governor George W. Bush: I don't believe we need to get the chickens across the road. I say give the road to the chickens and let them decide. The government needs to let go of strangling the chickens so they can get across the road.

Senator Lieberman: I believe that every chicken has the right to worship their God in their own way. Crossing the road is a spiritual journey and no chicken should be denied the right to cross the road in their own way.

Secretary Cheney: Chickens are big-time because they have wings. They could fly if they wanted to. Chickens don't want to cross the road. They don't need help crossing the road. In fact, I'm not interested in crossing the road myself.

Ralph Nader: Chickens are misled into believing there is a road by the evil tiremakers. Chickens aren't ignorant, but our society pays tiremakers to create the need for these roads and then lures chickens into believing there is an advantage to crossing them. Down with the roads, up with chickens.

Pat Buchanan: To steal a job from a decent, hardworking American.

Jerry Falwell: Because the chicken was gay! Isn't it obvious? Can't you people see the plain truth in front of your face? The chicken was going to the "other side." That's what "they" call it-the "other side." Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And, if you eat that chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like "the other side." That chicken should not be free to cross the road. It's as plain and simple as that.

Dr. Seuss:

Did the chicken cross the road?
Did he cross it with a toad?
Yes! The chicken crossed the road,
but why it crossed, I've not been told!

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross without having their motives called into question.

Grandpa: In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

Aristotle: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Saddam Hussein: This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

Ronald Reagan: What chicken?

Captain James T. Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.

Fox Mulder: You saw it cross the road with your own eyes. How many more chickens have to cross before you believe it?

Freud: The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

Bill Gates: I have just released eChicken 2000, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook -and Internet Explorer is an inextricable part of eChicken.

Einstein: Did the chicken really cross the road or did the road move beneath the chicken?

Bill Clinton: I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What do you mean by "chicken"? Could you define "chicken" please?

George Bush: I don't think I should have to answer that question.

Louis Farrakhan: The road, you will see, represents the black man. The chicken crossed the "black man" in order to trample him and keep him down.

The Bible: And God came down from the heavens, and He said unto the chicken, "Thou shalt cross the road." And the chicken crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing.

Mom: Because I said so.

7th Grader: To show the opossum that it could be done! (Thank you to Mark for that one!)

Colonel Sanders: I missed one?

Second Version

Plato: For the greater good.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken's dominion maintained.

Hippocrates: Because of an excess of black bile and a deficiency of choleric humour.

Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!

Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.

Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.

Douglas Adams: Forty-two.

Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.

B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.

Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.

Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the objects "chicken" and "road", and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Epicurus: For fun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

Johann von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain. Alone.

Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.

Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored) reason.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

The Sphinx: You tell me.

Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.

Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.

Ronald Reagan: I forget.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.

Third Version

GEORGE W. BUSH: We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either with us or it is against us. There is no middle ground here.

AL GORE: I invented the chicken. I invented the road. Therefore, the chicken crossing the road represented the application of these two different functions of government in a new, reinvented way designed to bring greater services to the American people.

COLIN POWELL: Now at the left of the screen, you clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.

HANZ BLIX: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed access to the other side of the road.

MOHAMMED ALDOURI (Iraq ambassador): The chicken did not cross the road. This is a complete fabrication. We don't even have a chicken.

RALPH NADER: The chicken's habitat on the original side of the road had been polluted by unchecked industrialist greed. The chicken did not reach the unspoiled habitat on the other side of the road because it was crushed by the wheels of a gas-guzzling SUV.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: I don't know why the chicken crossed the road, but I'll bet it was getting a government grant to cross the road, and I'll bet someone out there is already forming a support group to help chickens with crossing-the-road syndrome. Can you believe this? How much more of this can real Americans take? Chickens crossing the road paid for by their tax dollars, and when I say tax dollars, I'm talking about your money, money the government took from you to build roads for chickens to cross.

MARTHA STEWART: No one called to warn me which way that chicken was going. I had a standing order at the farmer's market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.

JERRY FALWELL: Because the chicken was gay! Isn't it obvious? Can't you people see the plain truth in front of your face? The chicken was going to the "other side." That's what they call it -- the other side. Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And, if you eat that chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like "the other side."

BARBARA WALTERS: Isn't that interesting? In a few moments we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heart-warming story of how it experienced a serious case of molting and went on to accomplish its life-long dream of crossing the road.

JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens crossing roads in peace.

VOLTAIRE: I may not agree with what the chicken did, but I will defend to the death its right to do it.

From a Libertarian Discussion Group

AYN RAND: It was in the chicken's own rational self-interest to cross the road. Not to have crossed the road would have been immoral. Behind every step of chicken-kind's long climb from the naked pastures to the automated chicken farms in New York City, there is at least one chicken who took the first step for the first time across that road. These chickens are heroes.

HARRY BROWNE: If the chicken hadn't so haphazardly crossed that road, there would have been a negotiated peace between Germany and the allies, which would have prevented the rise of Communism in Russia and China, the rise of Naziism and Fascism in Germany and Italy, which would have prevented World War II, the coummunist take-overs of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Korea, which of course would have halted before it ever began this long road to imperialism that the United States has taken. If only they'd stopped that chicken at that road.

L. NEIL SMITH: Was the chicken a sapient being? If it wasn't, then there was no reason -- it doesn't even know what a road is. If it was, then it had every right to cross that road, unless it was someone else's private property. The chicken has rights, once the egg has left the Hen, hatched, and once the chicken has had sufficient time to develop his sapient capacities. In any case, the chicken *might* cross that road, if a sufficient number of highway activists can convince him to do so by petition. I've always made it my job to embarrass these reluctant chickens out of the whole road-crossing movement. For more information, please buy my new book, "Hope for Chickens".

RON PAUL: It was flatly Unconstitutional for that chicken to cross that road, without a Declaration of Road-Crossing. That chicken is using our taxes to fund his wasteful attempt to cross that road. Please, urge your Congressman to join the Liberty Committee, where we can put a stop to this road-crossing boondoggle once and for all.

FRANCE: We know all about chickens. Was this particular chicken carrying a white flag?