“Can you believe this place?” Admiral Driscoll said to me. He sounded like a bit like a kid on Christmas morning. I felt weirdly like a jaded old man who had seen it all even though he is older and more accomplished. I understood then what some American soldiers and Marines mean when they say the top brass lives and works at “echelons above reality”. I’m not blaming the admiral. His job requires him to be isolated from nuts, bolts, and the street most of the time.
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This helps explain the Elder George Bush’s fascination with supermarket checkout scanners the first time he saw one in operation, much to the delight of his political opposition. (This was approximately 10 years after the rest of us were accustomed to seeing UPC scanners….)
God knows how many years it had been since the man had bought his own groceries.
I agree that many leaders are out of touch but the supermarket checkout scanner story has reached ‘Plastic Turkey’ levels of mythology.
Bush was reacting to the automatic inventory updating the supermarket had installed rather than the hand-scanner itself.
Not that that’s any less indicative of being out of touch from the perspective of a geek like me.
John,
Thanks for the correction.
-Allen in Fort Worth
The reporter who covered G.H.W. Bush admitted on C-Span to (Brian Lamb) being “naughty” in the way he covered the scanner thing; in other words he smeared Bush. I remember that one, but I don’t remember which reporter. Well they are almost all alike,eh?
It was New York Times reporter Andrew Rosenthal who commented on the original report from Gregg McDonald of the Houston Chronicle.
This is an urban legend so common, it’s on Snopes.
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/bushscan.asp
Just another example of how easy smear jobs were for the mainstream media to get away with before blogs.