RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2025. I have a lot of time these days for Gentleman Joe Walsh — “Former GOP Congressman. Ex Tea Partier turned relentless anti Trump truth teller.”

A few days ago Mr. Walsh posted on Twitter/X : “Donald Trump: ‘How do I know the 2020 election was rigged and that I really won it? Because Vladimir Putin said it was rigged, that’s how’ … Every day, the entire world — friend & foe — laughs at us for electing such a very stupid person. Every single day. They all laugh at us.”

Like many others outside America (though just across the lake in my own case) I agree with this sentiment, and I do my fair share of laughing. As with many others again, however, my laughter is of a particular sort. It’s captured by a haunting phrase from the depths of the American experience : “Laughing to Keep from Crying,”

This phrase clearly enough grows out of the inevitably troubling, always inspiring, and ultimately mainstream African American experience in the American republic — as illustrated by two uniquely American cultural creations of the 1950s :

(1) Laughing to Keep from Crying — a book first published in 1952, reprinted in 1976. A “collection of short stories” by the great African American writer from Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes, where “each story exemplifies a different aspect of race relations” in the USA of the first half of the 20th century (and no doubt beyond).

(2) Laughin’ To Keep From Cryin’ — a 1958 LP recording featuring the African American President of the tenor saxophone Lester Young, with trumpet giants Roy Eldrige and Harry “Sweets” Edison. Not the best of the prematurely aging President’s path-breaking work in modern jazz. (The presidential title was bestowed by the incomparable singer Billie Holiday, on some of whose best recordings Young also appears.) He would die all too early at 49 in the middle of March 1959. This Laughin’ To Keep From Cryin’ LP nonetheless captures a few notable moments from the buoyant 1950s jazz scene in cities across North America.

Then — quickly as I can manage — there are various more recent manifestations of the concept. Eg I’m Laughing To Keep From Crying … The Isley Brothers ; Laughing to Keep From Crying, Seasick Steve ; And Madonna – Laugh To Keep From Crying.

Finally : “Laugh to Keep from Crying is a 2009 American stage play created, produced, written and directed by Tyler Perry … The play is set at an inner-city building in a predominantly African-American neighborhood. It stars Cheryl Pepsii Riley as Carol …” A “performance released on DVD on August 30, 2011 was recorded live in Atlanta at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in July 2010.”

In the very end in my any city anywhere, planet earth, “Laughing to Keep from Crying” is also an excellent way of describing an ultimate reaction to the appalling cultural, economic, political, and sociological joke brought to us here north of the lakes, as everywhere else, by the second administration of President Donald J. Trump — Liberace and dodgy friends in the White House (as some might no doubt at least somewhat mistakenly say).

I on the other hand do take some encouragement from various signs, on many sides of the USA today, that the great recurrent historical experience of the real Democracy in America is also on the rise again — in California and Texas too, to say nothing of such other great free and democratic states of the union as Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington.

There is another new forward-looking progressive America in the 21st century, out there bubbling and gurgling — rising from all the new laughing to keep from crying. And it will finally recover the real historical democratic destiny of the United States of America from the destructive hands into which it has temporarily fallen (for a second time in the past decade!)

That is very certainly my prayer — along with many others around the global village, outside and inside the finally free and democratic USA, USA, USA, USA …