The meme election comes to a close
From our US edition
For most of American history, elections took a long time. Many of the gaps that still exist today between when counts begin, when certification happens, when electors meet and when the next winner is sworn in exist as a vestige of a past where lengthy travel and slow word of mouth meant people just did not know what had happened for quite some time. Election results happened at a distance. This created its own set of problems in the application of authority, but now we are dealing with something of a different nature: a demand for immediacy that throws patience aside and views every delay as suspicious. It’s one reason that we used to speak to each other in paragraphs, then in lines and phrases — now we can only manage memes.
