Help Wanted: Staff Grownup OK with Short Tenure

Being One Week of Presidential Blunders

When I arrived at the University of Texas in 1969, I had read more than I had discussed. The opportunities for discussion had been limited in rural Oklahoma.

I had read The Stranger and I admired Albert Camus but I called him “K-MOOSE.”

If you said to me, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,” I could on a good day attribute that to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but on any day I would pronounce the man’s name “GOTH.”

I was an American Indian kid raised by uneducated grandparents, so if I were speaking at the opening of a Louis Vuitton factory in rural Texas, I might have referred to the brand as “VOO-ton.” That happened this week. I’m not the president of the United States but if I were I think I would have informed myself in advance of a public event.

The same week, the POTUS made a call to the International Space Station, where astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir were making history as the first all-woman work crew in space. The president was either poorly briefed or he misunderstood, and so he announced “this is the first time for a woman outside of the space station.” In case we missed it, he repeated that this was “the first-ever female spacewalk.”

There was a bit of delay for the signal to reach the Space Station, where Astronaut Meir had to correct him or be seen in the small society…