The Great Philosophical Question

Some opinions on the eternal question, "why did the chicken cross the
road?"


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 light pink gooey stuff in its
pancreas.

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.

Noam Chomsky:
        The chicken didn't exactly cross the road. As of 1994,
something like 99.8% of all US chickens reaching maturity that year
had spent 82% of their lives living in confinement. The living
conditions in most chicken cooops break every international law ever
written, and some, particularly the ones for chickens bound for
slaughter, border on inhumane. My point is, they had no chance to
cross the road (unless you count the road to the supermarket). Even if
one or two have crossed roads for whatever reason, most never get a
chance. Of course, this is not what we're told. Instead, we see
chickens happily dancing around on Sesame Street and Foster Farms
commercials where chickens were not only crossing roads, but driving
trucks (incidentally, Foster Farms is owned by the same people who own
the Foster Freeze chain, a subsidiary of the dairy industry).
Anyway,...(Chomsky continues for 32 pages. For the full text of his
answer, contact Odonian Press.)

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

Timothy Leary:
        Because that's the only 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.

Oliver North:
        National Security was at stake.

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 it's 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 synchronictously brought such occurences 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 on your frame of reference.

Aristotle:
        To actualize it's potential.

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

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

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

Ernest Hemingway:
        To die. In the rain.

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

David Hume:
        Out of custom and habit.

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

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

Pyrrho the Skeptic:
        What road?

Ronald Reagan:
        I forget.

John Sununu:
        The Air Force was only too happy to provide the
transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of
the opportunity.

The Sphinx:
        You tell me.

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

Mark Twain:
        The news of it's crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Katherine McKinnon:
        Because, in this patriachial state, for the last four
centuries, men have applied their principles of justice in determining
how chickens should be cared for, their language has demeaned the
identity of the chicken, their technology adn trucks have decided how
and where chickens will be distributed, their science has become the
basis for what chickens eat, their sense of humor has provided the
framework for this joke, their art and film have given us our
perception of chicken life, their lust for flesh has made the chicken
the most consumed animal in the US, and their legal system has left
the chicken with no other recourse.

Stephen Jay Gould:
        It is possible that there is a sociobiological explanation for
it, but we have been deluged in recent years with sociobiological
stories despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about the
genetics of behavior, and we do not know how to obtain it for the
specific behaviors that figure most prominently in sociobiological
speculation.

Joseph Stalin:
        I don't care. Catch it. I need its eggs to make my omlette.

Malcom X:
        It was coming home to roost.