Election soon will be over; memes never die

“Are we there yet?,” America whines like a petulant child in a back seat. “Are we there yet?”

As this rough beast of an election season slouches toward Nov. 8 (that’s tomorrow, by the way), it is time to look back at the pop-culture moments the electorate has shared in the approximately 57 years this campaign has lasted.

Let’s scroll back to Jan. 21, when the Bernie Sanders ad called “America,” scored by Simon and Garfunkel, first appeared on YouTube. No matter the politics, American hearts swelled. CNN called the ad “downright goosebump inducing.”

Cue the sound of a needle screeching across a record, because we aren’t there anymore.

The Oracle at Delphi couldn’t have predicted an election cycle studded with “basket of deplorables” and “grab her by the [you-knowwhat].” It has gotten, to use one of the year’s unlikely words, nasty.

In just shy of a year the culture has gone from Birdie Sanders to Pepe the Frog. And it’s been illustrated by the meme culture of social media.

“Both sides of the aisle know how to meme now,” says Brad Kim, the editor-in-chief of KnowYourMeme. “It’s a fair and ugly game now.”

Four years ago, says Kim, who studies election memes both for his job

and his own interest, the Obama supporters were savvy on social media and the Internet, but the Republican side was flatfooted. That’s changed.

“Not only is meming playing on the same field, but also the politicians and campaigns themselves are using it in ways they didn’t before,” he says.

Garth Jowett says timing contributes to the sense of disruption. “It’s a whole new information flow,” says Jowett, a professor of communications at the University of Houston. “It’s instantaneous.”

And it’s instantly spun, as well.

“Framing can influence the perception of what just happened,” Jowett says. There’s what you saw, and then there’s what the pundits tell you you saw.

Kim says this is the first election cycle in which memes that have little or nothing to do with the election got sucked into the vortex. He’s been following Pepe the Frog for about seven years, and he says the green guy used to be “a kind of mascot for beta-male singledom.”

Then Pepe got hijacked by the alt right. And now, the Anti-Defamation League, which has added the frog to its database of hate symbols, and Pepe’s creator, Matt Furie, are trying to reclaim him with #SavePepe.

Even Skittles and Tic Tacs have been unfairly maligned.

“The potential to use (the Internet) for good is there,” says Stef Woods, who teaches American studies at American University in Washington, D.C., “but it has become a tool to entertain, deflect and distract.”

Rather than being a place where fact-checking and reliable sourcing take place, she says, social media have become a “culture of likes and positivity” where getting a thumb’s up is more important than getting it right. “Ideally it would be a place for debate and conversation,” Woods says.

When memes and funny videos are coin of the realm, acting responsibly becomes less important. The meme “serial killer Ted Cruz isn’t funny on several levels,” Woods says.

But it’s devilishly hard to control and not all negative. She cites the “such a nasty woman” moment from the third debate, which went from an insult to a rallying cry.

One of Kim’s favorite bits of election pop culture is the Facebook page called Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash, which has almost a half-million members and has long outlived the Sanders campaign to become its own quasi-community.

“I’m seeing that as far as Millennial voters are concerned, irreverence is becoming a big factor in the shaping of public opinion,” Kim says. “Elections used to require sobriety, but for Millennials that became boring. Pop culture has infiltrated areas that used to be humor-free.”

Brace for more. Any cyclical events such as elections or Olympics “will get memier and memier,” he says.

Woods holds out hope for the civic-minded. “I think we have to hope we will only get better as a nation from here.”

“Elections used to require sobriety, but for Millennials that became boring. Pop culture has infiltrated areas that used to be humor-free.”

Brad Kim, editor of KnowYourMeme