Vehicular Bugslaughter
Every day billions of us doom billions of us to death via kinetic energy. Most of the death-dealers don’t give it much thought, even when they’re squeegeeing off the mortal remains of their fellow creatures from their windshields.
We are killers, yet the ghosts of what we smash (or eat, or consign to starvation through eviction, or exterminate) don’t tend to haunt us. Our factory farms make a mockery of “reverence for life.” The havoc we have wreaked (or “reeked” as above) is all the more horrific for being commonplace.
And we name some of our children Alexander, and some others David. One dealt death wholesale, one retail (not Goliath; Uriah). It is no coincidence that Anthony Burgess named the berserker of his A Clockwork Orange Alex.
Socrates is said to have said “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
NOTE: Berni Wrightson and Mike Ploog are illustrators. Wrightson has worked with Stephen King, on Creepshow and The Stand and The Song of Susannah of the Dark Tower series. Ploog did some comic-book continuity in the horror genre as well; some of his panels from Werewolf by Night have been stuck in my memory for more than thirty years.
One with Clay, Image and Text 
Love the title. Good essay too, except that I disagree with you about Alexander the Great. I think he was the most important person in history, in a good way.
My problem with Alexander the Great was his megalomania, his sense of Manifest destiny that led him to attempt conquest to the “ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea,” going so far as countries and people with whom he had no reason to subjugate except that of his own lust for conquest. Never before nor since has one man named so many cities after himself. Unfortunately, plenty of times before and since have there been human beings with a similar lust for conquest; and he set the bar for the ones that followed him, so it can be argued that much of the shameful subjugative aspect of the history of the United States of America might be traced to him.
I like it that he brought Hellenic culture to the world. Probably most of the places he conquered were fighting each other anyway. He was also human to his enemies, once he’d conquered them.
Although you didn’t mention it, I will concede that my simply saying someone was the most important person in history doesn’t make him an okay guy. Vlad the Impaler was one of the most important persons in history, and (one of the) scratch that. THE worst person in history, but he did save Christendom from Islam.
Oh, that reminds me. I got quite the laugh out of the caption someone made that said, “Too easy. Christ. What an asshole.”
I’m thinking about placing the New Yorker’s Caption Contest on my blog, where people can have their own area for their captions. I wonder if it would garner any interest?