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 …

SPECIAL FROM L. FRANK BUNTING, GRAND BEND, ON. AUGUST 10, 2025. It is now more than a year since my last contribution to this august space — “Democracy in America holds Donald Trump to account at last in New York, New York (if not in more rural red states),” May 31st, 2024.

As I contemplate the long hot summer here in early August 2025 (28C “feels 36”/82F “feels 98”), I am pondering an email from the counterweights editors, asking how I feel about the state of the Trump II presidency now.

My first thought as I relax on the southeastern shore of Lake Huron, in Southwestern Ontario in central Canada, is that I feel somewhat happily disconnected from Trump USA Part Deux.

I disagree with Canadian PM Mark Carney on various issues (the future of the British monarchy in Canada eg). And his style is somewhat too deeply rooted in the honourable Canadian political tradition of compromise and good manners for my personal taste.

Like many others, however, I continue to have confidence in PM Carney’s ability to navigate the utter unpredictable craziness of President Trump’s approach to Canada-US trade (and much else) as successfully as is humanly possible.

And I continue to feel that in some ways the 51st state apostle Trump II has done Canada a great favour, by forcing it to stand up for itself at last.

I continue to believe as well that Donald Trump II’s first six months have largely been a disaster for the USA domestically — as yet not fully appreciated by the American body politic but bound to become clearer as time rolls on.

My sense is also that the broad democratic majority in the USA today still believes in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

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RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. THURSDAY, JULY 24, 2025. Some say the present president of the USA’s “swagger is GONE.” At the same time, he retains a “degree of feral cunning about things that can endanger him personally, politically, legally.”

Still others urge : “The president is trying to concoct a fantasy world in which prices are ‘all down’ … and his opponents are liars for correctly pointing out that federal data shows prices continue to rise.”

Still others again argue that Trump’s recent unmitigated lying on how “Obama and a group of thugs cheated on the elections” is just the latest evidence that “he’s mentally disturbed.”

And then, to ice the cake as it were, FactPost@factpostnews has noted “Pollster: Trump’s net approval rating has dropped nearly 20 points since the beginning of his presidency.”

From our particular vantage point just north of the North American Great Lakes (and in our own case just across the lake from upstate New York), all this yet again raises the question of how Donald Trump actually managed to get elected as president of the USA a second time (or a first time for that matter).

Two different answers to this increasingly fascinating if not exactly urgent question have lately come across my desk, at the edge of the beach in the middle of the summer of 2025.

(1) Too many ignorant voters ????

The first was an Xpost by a gentleman called Tim Russ, who has been “working as an actor, director, musician, and voice-over artist for the past 39 years here in Los Angeles.” It commented on a poll which asked “Should American schools teach Arabic Numerals as part of their curriculum?”

This is of course a trick question. The term “Arabic Numerals” is just what those in the know (as most of us should be?) call 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 — the“decimal numeral system”commonly used around the world today.

In deepest fact these Arabic Numerals should (as Wikipedia explains eg) most properly be called “Hindu–Arabic” or “Indo-Arabic.” The system is much more mathematically sophisticated than the “Roman Numerals” which prevailed in the old Roman Empire and its early European Christian successor states. It was “invented between the 1st and 4th centuries [CE or AD] by Indian mathematicians.”

By the 9th century this mathematically sophisticated decimal numeral system “was adopted by Arabic mathematicians,” and then “gradually adopted in Europe starting around the 10th century, probably transmitted by Arab merchants.” As a result 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth “came to be generally known as ‘Arabic numerals’ in Europe.”

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RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 2025. The high heat in the city these deep summer days could make watching the “Hallmark movie Jingle Bell Princess” — allegedly about a chilly Christmas in Maine, with deep snow on the ground — seem almost reasonable in the middle of July.

Add the wildfire smoke — as in “Toronto air quality drops to second-worst in world as city chokes on wildfire smoke” — and staying inside watching TV is allegedly more healthful than walking through the smoke to the local library, at the edge of the city park..

Add again that while Jingle Bell Princess (“released in 2021”) is allegedly about the US State of Maine on the Canadian border, it was shot in North Bay, Ontario (Canada), a three and three-quarter hour drive more or less due north of Toronto (and also in Sturgeon Falls, about a half-hour drive due west of North Bay).

Then add yet again that the female lead in Jingle Bell Princess is Merritt Patterson, who was born and raised in Whistler, BC in Canada, and began her career when at16 she won the “Canadian Herbal Essences’ Teen Model Search” in 2006.

And then still further again add that the male lead in Jingle Bell Princess is Trevor Donovan, who is interesting on at least two different grounds …

First, he was born in Bishop, California and raised in Mammoth Lakes some 42 miles northwest — an intriguing small urban centre (about 7200 people in 2020) “immediately to the east of Mammoth Mountain, at an elevation of 7,880 feet (2,400 m)” in the most easterly Republican regions of the Golden State.

Second, Trevor Donovan has the same initials as and otherwise resembles Troy Donahue (1936–2001), “an American film and television actor … a popular sex symbol in the 1950s and 1960s … best known for his role as Johnny Hunter in the film A Summer Place.”

Finally, all these things (and no doubt more) are what make Jingle Bell Princess if not exactly altogether worth watching, at least only a serious embarrassment if you confess your wasted time to others.

Note as well that Merritt Patterson and Trevor Donovan also star in the rom-com Twas the Text Before Christmas, shot here in Toronto (like many other movies of the past several decades) from May 15 to June 1, 2023. (These kinds of Christmas movies do not take a long time or a lot of money to make.)

Merritt Patterson has starred in at least a dozen “Hallmark Channel and Great American Family movies,” and has “won Best Supporting Actress at the Canadian International Faith & Family Film Festival.”

I have some suspicion that watchers of these and other rom-com movies often vote for Donald Trump in the USA. At least one source I’ve stumbled across alludes to “Christian actor Trevor Donovan.” And along with Trevor Donovan Wikipedia’s “notable people” from Mammoth Lakes includes “Trace Gallagher, Fox News anchor and reporter.”

On the other hand, in Canada my wife and I know at least one quite liberal community activist who seriously likes watching Christmas rom-coms in the middle of the summer! And then there’s me, myself, and I, who does not really like watching these TV movies but sometimes does it anyway!

RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. SUNDAY, JULY 6, 2025. As this summer weekend began (with a somewhat boisterous outdoor wedding party, on the lot immediately behind us, next street over), I suddenly stumbled across four quick notes on key current events in Canada and the wider global village today :

(1) “The world will adapt and improve itself by being less dependent on the Unstable States.” At 8:30 yesterday morning “Peter Ratcliffe, forever Canadian@PeterHRatcliffe” posted what strikes me as a wise and too-often-underplayed (if also perhaps somewhat radical?) position on Canadian international trade policy in the second Trump interlude : “Trump will ‘set his own tariff deals’. There was, now seemingly, never a point in negotiating with an authoritarian bully. He wanted all negotiations to fail, so he kept moving the targets … The world will adapt and improve itself by being less dependent on the Unstable States.”

(2) “Most of what our economy produces—close to 80%—never crosses a national border …it is produced in Canada, by Canadians, for Canadians.” The Ratcliffe position here reminded me of a provocative Toronto Star piece by the labour economist Jim Stanford, first published late this past March. Trump “has claimed Canada is ‘not viable’ as a country without exporting to the U.S. … This is false. Canada is the 10th largest economy in the world, with enormous human and natural resources … most of what our economy produces—close to 80%— … is produced in Canada, by Canadians, for Canadians … Trump’s trade war will cause enormous disruption.” But we can be “confident in our country’s ability to … ultimately thrive, even as we shift our orientation away from reliance on exports to the U.S. market.”

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RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. TUESDAY, JUNE 24, 2025. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s current trip to Europe — to sign a Canada-Europe security and defence pact in Brussels — may look somewhat provocative, in the immediate wake of Donald Trump’s sudden US strategic bombing of three nuclear energy sites in Iran.

Yet the so-called “Canada — EU Summit, planned for Monday evening” has now taken place And it was arranged some time before the present US president’s almost surprising military gamble in the Middle East. To round things out : “After Brussels, Carney will travel to The Hague for the NATO leaders’ summit” — as will President Trump (and both men were almost certainly there this afternoon).

I’d altogether agree that, as has been widely noted on Twitter/X and other places, one key motivation behind President Trump’s sudden decision to use US (technological) military might in Iran (in support of Israel, and against prospective Iranian nuclear weapons which no sane and informed observer can welcome) is just to distract public attention away from the (already) increasingly obvious domestic failures of the Trump administration 2.0, 2025–2029.

Moreover, these failures — starting with an absurd tariff policy from a dusty 19th century textbook, bound to raise already high prices — were dramatized by the contrasting US parades on Saturday, June 14, 2025. One was a dull, uninspiring official show in Washington, DC. The other was a dazzlingly vast array of almost surprisingly well-attended “No Kings” protests across the country. The timing of the US Iran bombing, a week after No Kings, is provocative.

(1) But is it also a gamble that just might work?

Several commentators on TV have called the US nighttime bomber attack on three Iranian nuclear sites “a gamble.” For anti-Trump Canadians like myself the biggest trouble with the gamble is that it just might work — and/or even already be working.

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. MONDAY, JUNE 16, 2025. In traditional western historical literature “June Days” means “an uprising staged by French workers from 22 to 26 June 1848 .. in response to plans to close the National Workshops, created by the Second Republic in order to provide work and a minimal source of income for the unemployed.”

Carrying on with the Wikipedia article on the subject, the “National Guard, led by General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, was called out to quell the rebellion. Over 1,500 people were either killed or injured, while 4,000 insurgents were deported to French Algeria. The uprising marked the end of the hopes of a ‘Democratic and Social Republic’.”

In France the June Days of 1848 can also be seen as the beginning of the historical process by which the short-lived Second Republic (1848–1852) turned into the Second Empire (1852–1870) under Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the original Napoleon Bonaparte who had turned the First Republic (1792–1804) into the First Empire (1804–1815).

More broadly, 1848 was a year of political change and (most often ultimately failed) revolutions in many parts of Europe and even the Americas.

Close to my personal home in what is now the independent UN member state of Canada, 1848 was also the year the British empire at last granted so-called “responsible government” (or what we might now call self-governing parliamentary democracy) to Nova Scotia, and the so-called United Province of Canada (modern Ontario and Quebec). And this was one political change of the year that did not, as it were, finally fail or turn into something quite different.

For a more sophisticated account of the iconic uprising staged by French workers see the late Helen Castelli’s “June Days (June 22-26, 1848)” — part of a massive online Encyclopedia of Revolutions of 1848, master-minded by James Chastain in the history department at Ohio University (and also published as a hardcover book in 2004).

I New June Days in Donald Trump’s America?

The June Days of 2025 in the USA, USA are in many ways clearly different, but in others clearly relevant or at least interesting. And after the contrasting marches in Washington, DC and many other American cities (and even it seems smaller towns) on Saturday, June 14, 2025, I am finding my own mood on Democracy in America 2025 at least somewhat more upbeat than it used to be.

(Tho, I should make clear, only after absorbing the social media reporting on Twitter/X, as opposed to US TV — and especially CNN and MSNBC, which apparently do have managements concerned not to offend the present president of the United States too much …)

By way of quick explanation, I’d just note four key current outposts from my recent Twitter/X and related email adventures :

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2025. As Andrew Delbanco explains in the May 29, 2025 issue of The New York Review of Books, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel The Great Gatsby was “published on April 10, 1925, to good reviews but disappointing sales.”

So the exact 100th anniversary of this now memorable historical event has come and gone almost two months ago. Yet those of us who only knew about the anniversary from Mr. Delbanco’s May 29 review of The Annotated Great Gatsby (James L.W. West III, ed., Amor Towles, intro) may be forgiven for celebrating the centennial almost two months late.

The ultimate judgements about the book offered by Mr. Delbanco, Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University in New York, also strike me as compelling. It has “continued to be read as, among many other things, an indictment of Jazz Age decadence” among monied Americans. Fitzgerald “had measureless contempt for ‘careless people’,” like the highborn characters in The Great Gatsby, who “‘smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money…and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’”

In the end, as Andrew Delbanco concludes, “ first and last, The Great Gatsby is a story of unrequited love that invites rereading or even reciting, as poetry does when there’s too much music in the words to be absorbed in a single listening. However counterfeit Gatsby may sometimes seem, there is … ‘something gorgeous about him,’ something ingenuous in his ‘extraordinary gift for hope.’”

As the summer of 2025 looms, even on the northern North American horizon in Canada, it seems almost impossible not to raise the at least remote possibility that Jay Gatsby — a key if congenitally mysterious figure in the book first published on April 10, 1925 — has something to do with the character of the almost 79-year-old Donald Trump 100 years later.

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. MONDAY, MAY 26, 2025. This is the last day of the Memorial Day long weekend in the USA.

Our version of something similar in Canada was last weekend. (We like to keep things a little different in Canada.) It is now celebrated as Victoria Day — “a federal statutory holiday, as well as a holiday in six of Canada’s ten provinces and all three of its territories.”

When all this began in the old “British North America” of the mid-19th century, Queen Victoria was the monarch and her birthday was May 24, 1819. Originally the holiday that was celebrated in various parts of what is now the Canadian confederation of 1867 was held on the exact day of May 24 . In the more practical recent past Victoria Day “ falls on the Monday between the 18th and the 24th (inclusive) and, so, is always the penultimate Monday of May.”

In an earlier era (which even those as old as I am know mostly from even older tales), “May 24” was popularly known as Firecracker Day, as in this celebrated rhyme : “The 24th of May/Is Firecracker Day/And if they don’t give us a holiday/We’ll all quit school.” (There are other slightly different versions : this is the one I learned from my mother long ago, I think.)

Personally I like the name Firecracker Day much better than Victoria Day. I see no good reason for celebrating the birthday of the old Queen Victoria (1819–1901) in 2025. But firecrackers are always worth celebrating (safely of course). And the main point of the late May holiday is that : “It is informally considered the start of the summer season in Canada.”

We did have public fireworks displays here in Toronto last Monday night. One took place not far from my house. (We could see at least the edges of the main bursts of colourful explosion from our second-floor balcony, as usual.)

Today, I want to celebrate the real 24th of May with three notes on current politics in the United States, Canada, and Alberta (and Quebec).

(1) Marc Elias : “It is only by stripping Republicans of power that we are going to have a real check on Donald Trump”

Marc Elias is “an American elections attorney for the Democratic Party. He founded Democracy Docket, a website focused on voting rights and election litigation in the United States, in 2020. He left his position as a partner at Perkins Coie to start the Elias Law Group in 2021.”

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RANDALL WHITE, “CANADA’S CAPITAL REGION FROM FOUR HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES WEST”. FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2025. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new Canadian federal cabinet held its first meeting the day before yesterday.

One of its “first orders of business” was a “tax cut for the middle class. Starting July 1, hard-working Canadians will keep more of their paycheques.”

This certainly underlines why some observers have wondered why Liberal PM Carney didn’t run for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. (And finally run on the track former Conservative PM Stephen Harper tried to set him on back when.)

Yet even an only slightly closer look at the members of Mr. Carney’s “smaller, focused cabinet with mix of veteran MPs, new faces, and several role changes” suggests a more complex and ultimately serious (North American) “liberal” edge to Canada’s new government in Ottawa.

(1) General shape of things to come (according to CBC News)

PM Carney’s new cabinet has 28 ministers, and 10 secretaries of state (“a long-dormant designation Carney is reviving” — these secretaries will not attend full cabinet meetings : only those where their specific responsibilities are involved). It includes “a mix of many new faces and some veterans.”

The full group of 38 includes “24 new people — 13 of them recently elected …Speaking to reporters after the swearing-in ceremony, Carney pitched the cabinet overhaul as a nod to Canadians’ desire for change … ‘We’re going to deliver on that mandate with a new team, purpose-built for this hinge moment in Canada’s history … We’ve been elected to do a job and we intend to do it quickly and forcefully’.”

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