In one of those accidental finds while looking for something else, I share with you this amazingly forgotten story from May 18, 1927 — a car bomb in Bath Township, Michigan, along with other explosions, that killed 45 people, mostly school children. Referred to at the time as the Bath School Disaster it seems to have completely disappeared from history.

The story is of interest for a couple of reasons, the first being that the guy detonated his car while he was in it, a footnote in the history of depravity and a lens to regard Iraq through. The second is that in all of last month’s agitation over the Virginia Tech massacres I heard over and over “the worst school shooting in American history.” Well yes, the Bath incident here cited wasn’t a shooting, but the body count surpassed Virginia Tech by a significant number. I wonder why we never heard of it?

The information about the perpetrator, Andrew Kehoe, doesn’t mention his religious beliefs, or lack of them, though it’s a pretty safe bet he wasn’t a Muslim. He was a fanatic anti-tax zealot, as are many of today’s right-wingers, and fits the profile of many modern berserkers — early childhood estrangement, indifference to suffering of others and cruelty to animals –though he had social skills enough to get into college and to persuade a wealthy young woman to marry him. If people could be represented schematically by molecular-looking arrays of traits, dispositions, thresholds, responses and initiatives I don’t suppose any one “molecule” would be exaxtly the same as another. You have to wonder, though, if in important ways the Andrew Kehoes and Cho Seung-huis are more alike in core aspects than they are like any of us.