Monologue Transcription

Do you hear it listeners?

The ringing of the triumphal arches and marble forums in your ears? Those are the echoes from the City of Glory. It still shapes your politics. Even your so called identity. And as the City of Science crumbles, what do we see? Confusion. Progessives, liberals, and conservatives clashing like weather vanes in a storm. Left. Right. Do you know where those names come from? Seating charts. The French Revolution. A squabble over chairs. Is that your identity? A game of musical chairs? The world is faced with a wave of reaction -louder than progress, sharper than tradition. Every faction claims to be the future, but shouts for the past. But this is no anomaly. It is the pattern. Every new medium fractures the old City, releases its ghosts, and sets the factions against each other on shifting ground. So let us look backward. Let us see how the City of Glory itself was born— under the banner of the alphabet. It began on the seas. The Phoenicians, masters of harbors and coastlines. They carved not pyramids, not ziggurats— but marks simple enough for sailors. Letters that could be learned in a season, traded like tin or cedar. From those marks, others took fire. The Greeks bent them toward argument— schools, stages, assemblies. A polis bound not by lineage, but by debate. To speak was to belong. To be recorded was to endure. The Jews bound them to memory— a covenant portable as a scroll, a nation carried in words. The Etruscans pressed them into clay, laying the groundwork for Rome. And Egypt—once eternal—refused. It clung to hieroglyph and priestly caste. And so its power waned as others mastered the simpler script. This was the sovereignty of the City of Glory: the right to be recorded. To write was to exist. And what did it reject? The tombs. The whispers of stone. Gone. The alphabet built a new world. Trade multiplied. Philosophy flowered. Rome and Persia rose— empires of unfathomable scope and bureaucratic power, seemingly built to last forever. But there was a flaw. The alphabet was too neutral. It served poet and bureaucrat alike, philosopher and tax collector. And as scrolls piled higher, the City grew weary. The people wanted clarity again. A Book. And so, right under their noses, the codex was born. Pages bound, canonized, weaponized. Philosophy yielded to theology. The chorus became a creed. And the City of Glory collapsed quietly, without its citizens even knowing. When the codex appeared, the game changed. Christianity. Islam. Movements framed as returns to purity, yet carried forward by the very alphabet they sought to transcend. Reactionaries, conservatives, progressives— all fighting on the battlefield of Glory, never seeing that the battlefield itself was shifting beneath their feet. This is the pattern. The press arrives— and Luther is born. A radical reactionary, clashing with Catholic conservatism in a dying City neither understands. And again— political convection reorients the factions. Progress, tradition, reaction—reshuffled by the medium itself. And now? Here we are. The digital age. Reaction blooming everywhere— not anomaly, but inevitability. The medium has shifted. The ground is moving. And Left and Right flail in its storm. Remember, listeners: Politics is not fixed. It is convection. And the medium— not your ideology— decides the weather. And so it was the alphabet, gave a voice to the margin dwellers -