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change. Few forces are more intense than tribal memory and grievance, the blood's need for vindication. $ The past wants revenge, like Hamlet's father's ghost. Peace settlements in South Africa and the Middle East will bury the bloody shirt, shut down the past as an imperative. The projects of Mandela-De Klerk and Arafat-Rabin are not yet realized, of course. Leaders must bring followers along. Leaders must exercise the visionary's gift. They must tell their people a new story about themselves (in these cases, the story of themselves at peace, to replace their older myth of struggle) and make it plausible. Peace is a way of reimagining the world. Often the peace must actually be made before people will embrace the idea. We do not know -- and may not know for months or years -- how good these four will be as storytellers. Of course, it is possible that the year's peacemaking has merely lit a couple of candles on an altar that has been dedicated for centuries -- and is still dedicated -- to human sacrifice on an Aztec scale. Blessed are the peacemakers, and few in number. Still, in the words of Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute of International Relations: ''The fact that Muslim and Jew, black and white, accept each other proves that war between civilizations is not inevitable. This sends out a global message of hope.'' Jean Cocteau remarked in his memoirs that stupidity is always amazing to behold, no matter how often one has encountered it. If war represents at bottom a kind of moral stupidity, the Men of the Year were making their way out of that violent region and toward a better part of the mind. That too was amazing to behold.
