What a time we’ve had with Kathy Griffin. Let’s take a nostalgic look back — first to the image of Griffin holding up the president’s severed head. Then to her panicked apology. Then to CNN and Squatty Potty (don’t ask) severing its ties with her amid complaints from Trump family members. And finally to that gloriously deranged press conference in which a sobbing Griffin claimed she was being “censored” and that Donald Trump “broke me.”

Ah, memories, like the corners of my mind. Misty, water-colored memories . . . of the Way We Are.

Total elapsed time from severed head to “he broke me”: Three. Whole. Days.

Griffin wanted the image of the severed head to go viral, and it did — along with Griffin’s perpetration of the image. If Griffin’s career is over, it will have ended due to her own suicidal act and not due to pressure from the Trumps. You live by the meme, you die by the meme.

Griffin’s conspiracy theory is bonkers. No one needed to organize the attacks on her since they came from all sides. No one had to threaten or attempt a boycott of her; she has lost work because employers preemptively forestalled any such effort by axing her before it could start.

They know that a viral campaign creates more trouble than it’s worth — unless it provokes a backlash that stiffens the backs of those who actually like the person who’s in trouble and causes them to rally in response.

It was not ever thus. Pre-internet, there was no such thing as a viral campaign because all such campaigns had to be hand-stitched and painstakingly mounted.

In 1989, a housewife named Terry Rakolta was so appalled by the raunchy sitcom “Married . . .with Children” that she went and contacted 42 advertisers to ask why they were providing commercial support to a show she considered horribly offensive.

Rakolta got results; a few advertisers suspended their ad buys on the show. But these responses took weeks and months to accumulate and time has a way of cooling off controversies. And a year later, Entertainment Weekly was reporting that the boycott’s effects had petered out. “Free speech,” EW intoned, “is safe from Terry Rakolta.”

Rakolta’s campaign took an immense amount of labor. Today, efforts to destroy careers or force people to kowtow to heated opinion require nothing of those who engage in them but 140 characters or a retweet or an endlessly shared Facebook post.

Do you want to want Bill O’Reilly off his show? You don’t even need to change out of your pajamas. Do you loathe Sean Hannity and hunger to see him fired? You don’t even need to buy a stamp or walk to a mailbox, let alone attend a rally. Do you want Radiohead to re-route its world tour away from Israel because you’re a hater of the Jewish state? You can threaten them without even canceling your Spotify account.

Anyone can join any crusade at literally no cost mentally, emotionally, logistically, or financially. Outrage has been weaponized.

Yes, this is The Way We Are. One false move and your career is dead.

And in three months, half the people who carried virtual pitchforks in the social-media lynch mob won’t even be able to remember what had so angered them in the first place. After all, there are new outrages every day, and new scalps to claim.