One question: how the hell did we pick Trump to be President to begin with?

OK, perhaps not exactly what you were hoping for. Election night wasn't a real thriller for a whole lot of people, and now it looks as if we're going to be counting votes for … quite a while. Will everybody still be talking about it at Thanksgiving dinner? If so, be careful not to invite your cousin in Pennsylvania who forgot to vote.

The post-election fog was so thick that we occasionally lost track of some details – like, say, who was winning. Joe Biden certainly seems to be doing better when it comes to little details like getting the most votes. Donald Trump, whom you can feel free to refer to as "the long-shot contender", has responded exactly the way you'd expect – declaring victory while waving around lawsuits.

"This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country," said the man who is definitely an expert in being fraudulent and embarrassing.

All this leaves us with two questions: one practical and one cosmic.

The cosmic one has been with us for four years now – how the hell could American voters have picked Trump to be President to begin with? And how, after four years of his Fib-a-Minute administration, could they have come even remotely close to re-electing him?

Excellent query, and I am happy to say that answering it will require us to go back to the early 1800s, when average Americans – OK, average American white males – got the right to vote. Popular elections took over from the rule of the elite property owners. The new voters, many of them in very small rural towns, led lives that were isolated and pretty darned boring.

Then in came politics! Newspapers, taking advantage of the expanding postal system, took the side of one party or another, with the strong expectation that editorial support would lead to advertising patronage. Political wheeler-dealers wooed voters with parades, dances and quite a bit of alcohol. The presidential contenders tended to be heavily along the war-hero line, and the drunken, parading, flag-waving elections were the closest thing many people had to entertainment.

Now, in a way, we've gone back – we're watching elections work themselves out through a world of howling social media. It's naturally chaotic, sometimes engrossing and occasionally – all right, often – horrifying. The voting process no longer necessarily involves a lot of drinking, though on nights like Tuesday, much of the citizenry may well have had to make up for lost time. (Keen-eyed observers have also noted that Tuesday featured a whole lot of election victories for legalising drugs of many different kinds.)