Mona tells me: "Listen, Mirabelle, you are impossible, you never tell me anything that awakens my spirit, only trifles, I felt stupid the other day when I met Jazmine, [Jazmine is some sort of a slut who is always chasing Mona, I don't like her, of course]. Jazmine said to me, that kink, 'So Mona, you who know Mirabelle so well, (and she is a genius according to you), please tell me this story of the End of History". She speaks like this, Jazmine, she has no style, not like you Mira I must say, you never say anything really interesting, but you have style, yes, you do, my sweet baby.

"So much for style, but nevertheless I felt stupid, so, I want you to tell me that End of History right now".

"Me", I answer wittily, "don't you want me to start at the beginning ?"

That sort of remark does not work on Mona, she knows me too well, "OK, stop that, I want you to tell me the End of History starting from the beginning".

"OK", I say, "lie down, grab your thumb and listen".

"First, History with a capital H, does not exist, there are only small histories of people like us to whom stories happen. No one is interested in these stories, well they are, but they don't know that they are writing History too. OK, then they die, everybody forgets them and they leave nothing behind except little things: letters to their wife, medals, monuments to the dead or bits of bones in the Museum of Natural History. That's what they were doing in the ancestors' caverns, Mona. They were preparing to leave a piece of bone while letting the kids cover the place with graffiti.

But, Karl Marx says they owned nothing that was theirs in their grotto, each one was picking what he needed from the heap, the land belonged to everybody, and as there was nothing to steal, there was no History, but just stories of tits and ass, chow, play, let's say individual stories".

"Yes" Mona says, "and Karl Marx, who's that guy?" I was sure she was going to interrupt me.

"Karl Marx" I said, "whose great-grandson I knew (he was a painter), was a bearded German, quite temperous, loved by women, notably his own called Jenny, and his maid-governess whose name I can't remember, with whom he also had children; well he was quite a normal guy, living in England when he died. Every reader is asked to go and drop a red flower on his grave at Highgate cemetery.

Well, so, he had met a Hegel, G.W., who had ideas on History, which is the least a German professor can do. Hegel was saying that there was something like an Idea, that existed nobody knows precisely where, which was some sort of driving force, an Idea(l), which strangely enough matched point by point Hegel's political views. He was a moderate democrat, and thought that this Idea, the Weltgeist, was being incarnated slowly into the world. Weltgeist means the spirit of the world, Mona, and so when the Idea is completely incarnated, History stops, perfection is achieved and it is just time for the angel to blow the trumpet.

One day while walking through Berlin, that Hegel saw Napol¸on Bonaparte pass by, and he said: 'I saw the Weltgeist riding on a horse'. History had ended. The ideal of the world had been found in the remains of the French Revolution with a master in boots".

"And what's with Karl Marx in all of that?"

"Well, he claims that there's no Weltgeist and that History begins in the grotto when some say this is mine and not yours, that they form bands, of those who have and those who don't. Karl Marx says, history has always been, until now, that of class struggle, classes being the groups of people who posses and those who don't, or let's say they don't in the same way; and Karl Marx says that those who possess banks or factories have common interests which they obviously defend and that the group made up of everybody else also has common interests to defend. That's class struggle, phew, well, OK yes, something like that anyway."

"Yes" Mona says, "but you are always getting around the subject; what about the End of History?"

"Look, in fact Karl Marx was not very interested in the End of History, he says 'philosophers have only interpreted the world, now it has to be transformed'. So then, about the End, we'll see later on.

Not very much later, in fact before, there happened to be some of Karl's disciples who, they say, took power in far away territories and they declared that they were going to suppress those classes whose movement was creating history. Naughty spirits asked how society could be moved without the class struggle engine and universities were opened for them in Siberia to teach them not to ask stupid questions. Well, they went even further than that because one of the chiefs, Lenin, declared that a simple cook would be able to govern the state. One can assume this to be the End of History because at this point it all comes down to a question of administering things. In contrast, History is deciding the fate of men, their life and death. The cook, female of course, would be there to organise things, like the colour of the dust bins and the size of pants, the free citizens of the classless society needing no police, no army, no priests

All well and good but it did not work out, the cooks remained in the kitchens, where there was not much to cook anyway, and the End of History, that variant of it, was put back for a good long while.

And, when the class suppressers fell and turned back into bankers and Mafiosi or beggars, the Hegelians got back on top. It was said, chiefly by a Japanese Hegelian and CIA agent named Fukuyama, (well not exactly, rather he was

at the state department of the USA), that there was no longer an antagonist model to the liberal democratic society, a model that could suppress it totally, turn it upside down forever. Nobody could now rise and say 'Who will win?', the Empire of Evil is dead, only the Empire of Good survives. And the above mentioned angel appears, blows, tuba mirum, Hegel gets out of his tomb, always ecstatic for people on horses, and says: 'The democratic bourgeois society has no antagonists anymore, there is no more antagonism, this is final, and the Weltgeist is reincarnated in the form the US senate'".

"That" says Mirabelle, "is what the Nipponese claimed! You should always beware of Japanese, Mona, one of them ate a Dutch girl in France, was considered insane, and got cured very rapidly, exported back to Japan where he made a TV show on Dutch cooking. But since it's been looking like the world Holy Empire is not so neat, the senate of the US of A is considering whether cigar smoking constitutes a sexual act, the banks of Japan are collapsing and Fukuyama is queuing to get part of his savings back. Maybe the old engine has found some more fuel to burn. The bourgeoisie produces nothing, except the seeds of its own destruction.

Mona, are you asleep?"

Mirabelle [mirabelle@angelic.com]