OK CITY BOMBING AN INNOCENT ERROR (C)1995 Alan M. Schwartz At 0910 hrs 19 April 1995 - the second anniversary of the Waco, TX massacre - a nine story, block-long building in Oklahoma City, OK was devastated by a 2000 pound car bomb. Its second floor day care center was crowded with dozens of toddlers and other innocents. BATF despots occupied a higher floor with a better view. Hundreds of lives were lost. The Official truth of a pair of rednecks blowing away the BATF played in Peoria. The facts are simpler: It was a cry for help by credulous victims of employment prejudice who were fated with cartographically- challenged lives and a desire for grits with breakfast. American Mensa, Ltd. had for decades lurked in Brooklyn, NY - mosh pit for celebrations of ethnic diversity, heartland of multiculturalism, and roiling cauldron of more daily muggings than a dog has fleas. Mensa directors had punctiliously documented the vaporization of a $500,000 advertising budget. The monthly "Mensa Bulletin" was renowned for its scrawny substance. Its pablum-bland contents were thoughtfully accented by an insipid Happy Face cover. Employees were content to draw their salaries and expense accounts, routing the paperwork through mystically incapable but oh-so-expensive computer systems possibly purchased by management at Bronx swap meets for treble OEM sticker price. Membership plummeted by 20%, proffered arguments about "natural size" notwithstanding. When your world collapses, it is time for a road trip! Taking no notice of pesky bylaws, management plied swift knees to Fort Worth, TX and hauled the infrastructure of the whole shebang with them. They were inspired by their soon to be ex-employees who, blooded denizens of the Mensa corporate culture demimonde, were tossing incoming membership checks and glutting wastebaskets with constituent correspondence lest the misery of their pending redundancy overwhelm them. They were victims! The next week the remaining few scavenged the home office for personal possessions and anything pawnable not bolted to the foundation. They found a surprise in the stationery closet. After a four foot pry bar freed the armored door stuck to its jamb, they saw: A ton of prilled ammonium nitrate, five five- gallon jugs of diesel fuel, ten five-pound cans of atomized aluminum, a cubic foot box of 40 micron glass microballoons, a chub of C4 plastique, a box of #8 blasting caps, and three reels (red, white, brown) of 17 ga. Belden copper wire. It was just the ticket to fertilize a lawn, fuel tiki lamps, paint garden furniture, line a 30 foot boat with syntactic foam to buoy it to the surface after release from the depths of the Mariana Trench, remove a tree stump from your backyard, and rewire doorbells. The victimized superannuated employees were determined to take the goods to Fort Worth, as a gesture. They dumped powders and liquids into a borrowed cement mixer and tumbled well to show their pique. How could they know they had conjured 2150 pounds of boosted ANFO - a bodacious but safe explosive because nothing short of a #8 blasting cap in a lump of C4 will detonate it. They tamped the grey solid into a U-Haul trailer, decorated it with metal fingers stuck into balls of white clay, and ran colored wires like the Latin square part of the Mensa admissions test. Adding an old car battery as a spare plus a wind-up alarm clock, they covered their objet d'art with a tarp and departed. A characteristic of the gifted is their inability to tell left from right, clockwise from counterclockwise, or withershins from deasil. They got lost in Oklahoma and stopped at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building for directions. One lady set the alarm clock and they made for breakfast in the lobby. Just thereafter, two rednecks in a rented Ryder truck pulled up, there to register grievances with the Welfare office. They saw the Mensa U-Haul, and laughed! They did a good one, hooking the positive pole of the old car battery to the alarm clock hammer, then some red wires coming from under the tarp to the bell, then some white ones to the other side of the battery, the brown ones to the U- Haul ironwork just like ground wires, and the negative battery pole to the iron frame. They sure were glad they took that home study electrical course from the matchbook cover. When that alarm clock rang, haw haw haw! Anyway, their bellies were empty, so they took their crappy car - it did not even have license plates - and made for a diner on the other side of town. The rest, as they say, is history.