COLUMN LEFT : A Hunger for More Than McPolitics : Havel and Mandela stir our imaginations because so many of our own politicians don’t.

“The people are tired of greatness,” Walter Lippmann wrote as he reflected on the jaded public mood of the 1920s. But if Lippmann could observe the 1990s, he would find a people who seem positively to hunger for greatness, even if they have a hard time finding it in American politics.

An entire generation, according to a recent Newsweek survey, is growing up without political leaders. Today’s teen-age heroes, the magazine reports--once the ephemeral pop culture icons, such as Michael Jackson and Bart Simpson, are winnowed out--are the same as they were in surveys 25 years ago: John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. American public heroes are to be found only in cemeteries or on bank notes.

But in the first six months of this year, figures from other political cultures have laid hold of the American imagination--first Vaclav Havel, then Mikhail Gorbachev, now Nelson Mandela. These are politicians in which substance takes precedence over style; all three are engaged in historical struggles in which fundamental questions about power and principle are at stake. And while mass apathy characterizes modern American politics, the charisma of Mandela and Havel is bound up with the presence of innumerable ordinary South Africans and Czechoslovaks as actors in the political drama.

While Gorbachev reminds Americans that politics can be a daily war of survival against real ideological adversaries, Havel and Mandela have paid a price that no American politician of this generation has contemplated. Both have been persecuted and jailed for their political beliefs.

For the years of their silencing, the two men were almost invisible to us. In their prison cells, perhaps mercifully, they were not groomed for politics by television. Until last year, how many in Congress even knew the name of Havel, the banned playwright, creature of the counter-culture of the ‘60s, defender of the Plastic People rock band? In February, Havel quoted Jefferson in the U.S. Capitol and called in the same breath for “a global revolution of human consciousness” that would “put morality above politics.” He must surely have allowed himself an inner ironic smile as the blow-dried ranks, besieged by ethics charges, rose in a standing ovation.

Mandela has been a model of tactful diplomacy in addressing his American audiences. But his principles cannot help but come through, often in ways that cast his host society in an unflattering light. “Our education is not controlled by our people but by whites,” he told students at a Brooklyn high school. “Same here, same here,” the kids chorused in reply.

This week, everyone wants to be seen with Mandela. Our politicians, green for a day in April, are now black for a day. In the past, the United States has been less indulgent of Mandela. His original jailing in 1962 came after a tip-off by the Central Intelligence Agency. That revelation pricked consciences on the eve of his visit--although in fact it was old news, first reported in this country by CBS News in 1986, at the time when American sanctions were first imposed against South Africa. Our political memories are short.

Ironically, it can take commentators of the far right, driven by animus and perhaps by their secret sympathies for apartheid, to draw attention to Mandela’s values. They are correct: Mandela does make common cause with other Third World liberation movements. He believes that Palestinians, as much as black South Africans, deserve a homeland and political rights. The African National Congress stands for a radical redistribution of wealth and many of its supporters in the townships continue to believe in a principle that is no longer spoken of in polite society--socialism.

The conservative ideologues are correct, in fact, to see Mandela as a subversive figure. Subversive not of Jeffersonian democracy, but of its cheapened parody, the smug and mediocre McPolitics of present-day Washington. The rapturous reception accorded to Mandela and Havel suggests that they stir in Americans what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory” of an unfinished national agenda of social justice, a set of principles that lie at the core of the American political tradition but are dribbled away these days in 15-second sound bites.

If we listen carefully to Nelson Mandela, we manage to reintroduce the ideals of which he speaks into our impoverished and intolerant political language. We may even conclude that it is men like this who are, to quote something Ronald Reagan once said in an absurdly different context, “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers.”