It was just a low-grade insurgency when I arrived in Saigon in February 1962, jostling a camera and portable typewriter. Newly elected President John F. Kennedy was already forging his self-proclaimed New Frontier in South Vietnam.

He had ordered the disembarking of banana-shaped helicopters in Saigon and dispatched more American advisers to the countryside. There, Vietnamese villagers were “ready to be ignited,” a cadre noted. And Communist-inspired guerrillas were vigorously igniting them.

Then, just 13 years later, with historic abruptness and finality, the Vietnam War ended. On April 30, 1975 — the 48th anniversary just occurred — the world was stunned by iconic images of desperate Vietnamese identified with Americans clawing aboard a U.S. helicopter perched on the narrow runway platform of a building.

North Vietnamese tanks and troops seized Saigon’s Presidential Palace, after the humiliating collapse of South Vietnam’s armed forces that had cost millions of dollars, thousands of U.S. and Asian lives, and incalculable prestige.

A “ragged-ass little fourth-rate country” — President Lyndon Johnson’s words — had etched for America its first politico-military defeat.

Underpinning this defeat, however, was an unacknowledged factor — the advent of television. I termed it a “mediashift” after reading Harold Innis and his 1950 landmark “Empire and Communications.”

Innis found that communication media are so central to social structure and culture that the principal axis of change — or the rise and fall of empire — will be a change in the communication technology that the society mostly relies on. He saw America’s culture as being based on print media that foster speed, commercialism and militarism.

Later, a second made-in-America mediashift arrived — social media. It enabled — even aided — a look-alike Vietnam insurgency within America itself.

The 1960s counterculture spotlighted Innis’s findings. Toddlers watched television before they learned to read. Changing the way they accessed information silently, unknowingly changed their senses, thinking and world-view.

They questioned their parents’ values and — as fighting in South Vietnam escalated — protested their government’s national draft as record numbers of U. S. men reached its 18-to 26-year-old age bracket.

Television transported into American living rooms the visual immediacy of the bloodshed and battlefield that I was unable to capture in writing for Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune or the Christian Science Monitor.

Shades of Vietnam’s insurgency began to waft to America itself. Like the failed coups I had covered in Saigon, President Richard Nixon subverted democracy’s rule-of-law foundation until exposed by the Watergate scandal that forced his 1974 resignation.

Americans’ grievances began snowballing, like the Vietnamese villagers ready to ignite when I arrived in Saigon. Grievances in the U. S. grew with the mounting costs of Middle East misadventures, the loss of Rust Belt manufacturing jobs and the masculinity they embodied. The 2008 election of America’s first Black president rekindled latent pro-segregationist sentiments.

Antipathy toward immigrants, migrants and “the other” was tinged with xenophobia, like that exploited so adroitly by Vietnamese Communists. Hardcore elements of Christianity in the U. S. flexed their political muscle to oppose legalization of abortion, same-sex marriage and gay rights, much like the militant Buddhists who sparked the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem’s government in 1963.

This constellation of U. S.-made grievances was fostered by a second mediashift — the increased use and adaptations of social media. These cyber-platforms like Twitter and Facebook enabled (but did not determine) a horizontal mode of remote conversation that had been closed to e-citizens using top-down print and broadcast media.

These grievances were solidified and ignited by the Tweetified presidential campaign of Donald Trump and his successful 2016 election. But Tweets are too technically abbreviated to provide discussion needed for solutions or compromise, like that afforded by oral cultures based on close human contact.
Social media facilitate “swarming,” messaging e-citizens anywhere and everywhere all at once to focus on a single target, like the hum of honeybees beckoning them to their nest.

Enabled by social media’s swarming, Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, beaconed his followers to a massive rally in Washington and urged them to disrupt Congress as it sought to certify the peaceful transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden.

Tweets are too technically abbreviated to provide discussion needed for solutions or compromise.

Then insurgents stormed the U. S. Capitol while Congress began certifying Trump’s defeat. That almost-successful January 6 disruption of Congress recalled to me the momentous coup d’etat in Saigon that overthrew President Diem’s government.

Even more, the January 6 insurgents made visible a cyber-spectacular — while the whole world was watching — of an assault on the U.S. government, which President Nixon had secretly subverted 48 years earlier.

Now, 48 years after the end of the Vietnam War, America’s insurgency is still unfolding. It is being fought with subpoenas and counter-investigations rather than AR-15s.

These two “mediashifts” — television and social media — have enabled America’s slow-motion fall from empire. They came as the U.S. awaits still more mediashifts — A.I., Metaverse and of others not yet born.