You have certainly made a strong case to take memes more seriously (well, like all art forms, those that really deserve it, there is some crappy stuff out there).
I was actually getting tired of the cardib picture. They have done so much with that image!

Someone even put a Maduro head on. The good thing about memes, and i guess any cultural critic would agree, is that their potential to become "viral", their versatility and their ephemerality (if the word fits), provide valuable information about people's interests across cultures or social groups and how from the basic joke other more political issues start permeating and being incorporated into the whole scheme, which also speaks volumes of what people care about at a given moment.
It's a fascinating thing and you have done a wonderful job here putting something so apparently innocuous and worthless into proper perspective.