Just the Dad Next Door
One of the fundamental foundations of irony throughout the text is the author’s insistence upon presenting her childhood as just your normal, everyday, average experience shared by tens of millions of American girls at her age. For instance:
“When we were in elementary school, our dad left work daily in time to get home for a run while I rode my bike next to him. We had family game nights to play our favorite, Sorry!, and went to more baseball games than we could count.”
Why Sorry! was their favorite game may never be known for sure, but care to guess exactly why this portrait of the family next door went to more baseball games than could be counted? Because in 1990, when the author was on the verge of leaving elementary school behind for middle school, her typical everyday dad was part owner and managing general partner of the Texas Rangers.
Barbara Bush’s Courage
Another good source of irony in the book is the abundance of stirring, inspirational quotes attributed to various famous family members in the Bush clans. For instance, former First Lady Barbara Bush—the author’s grandmother—is given quite the spotlight on integrity when she solemnly intones at one point: “It isn’t courageous to do the right thing.” Ironically enough, the author fails to provide any words of wisdom expressed by her grandmother upon the disclosure of her decision to do the right thing by contributing money to the Bush-Clinton Hurricane Katrina Fund, which was made on the condition that the charity enter into a contract to do business with a company owned by her least famous son, Neil Bush.
Intentional Irony
One of the few examples of actual intended irony in the book arrives, ironically enough, not at the hands of the author herself, but an actor doing a bit on a TV news program. Apparently aware of irony and impressed by its use, the bit by actor Sacha Baron Cohen in his persona as German celebrity Bruno is extensively quoted:
“Why do artists do anything? Why did Louis Armstrong walk on ze moon? Why did Caesar build Rome in a day? Why did Leonardo DiCaprio paint the Mona Lisa?”
Wonder How She Got the Gig
The quoting of Cohen as Bruno concludes with an ill-conceived decision to see the raunchy comedy in a public theater with her eighty-something grandfather who just so happened to be the former president of the United States. And this anecdote is a way of building to recognizing her ten-year anniversary as an on-air correspondent for NBC News. That chapter opens with an example of irony not just unintended, but one can only assume still completely unrealized:
“If you’d asked me twenty years ago if I would one day pursue a career in media, I would have said absolutely not.”
Most people would have agreed considering she was an English teacher when she got the job with no training in journalism or broadcasting. The only qualification she possessed for the hiring, in fact, seemed to be that she shared the same last name of two men who had been president.
Thank God for Trump
Let’s be honest: There is no single American family more thankful that Donald Trump became president than the family of Laura and George W. Bush. Such has been the ability of Trump to do the seemingly impossible—improve the legacy of the disastrous administration of the second President Bush—that even the single most jaw-dropping example of unintended irony is actually treated by the author as an act of heroism. To wit, her quoting of a speech by the president who instituted a policy of torturing Muslims based solely on a presumption of possible potential guilt of some crime that may or may not have been committed by anyone at all:
“America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect.”
