America Searches for Content in Heroes in Values : Heroes: U.S. icons of the past, awe-inspiring to foreign leaders from Eastern Europe to South Africa, are prophets without honor here at home.

Several years ago I escorted a group of American college students to an interview with the Speaker of the British House of Commons. The Speaker’s schedule dictated that the meeting take place in the ornate dressing room where he was being enrobed before assuming his place on the dais that dominates the debating well between the tiered House benches. Arriving a bit late, we saw the back of a tall figure already mantled in a black gown. Attendants fluttered about him, draping various accouterments on his lanky frame.

As he turned to greet us, an almost undetectable flicker of surprise ruffled his dignified composure. Then he surveyed the assemblage of young Americans, wearing shorts, T-shirts, sandals and baseball caps, being ushered into the vestment chamber of the Speaker of the Mother of Parliaments, and he proceeded to deliver a lecture.

The lecture was not about dress standards--though I’ve always suspected it was the students’ attire that prompted it. It was about taking things for granted. More particularly, it was about taking freedom for granted.

“Men have died for your freedom,” he said in his booming Welsh baritone. The students looked as if they had just been slapped with a wet towel. Did real people talk like that? They had heard that sort of thing only in movies--mostly black-and-white movies, the boring kind. What odd and sentimental folk these Brits were!

Americans have had many occasions in recent months to witness this unsettling foreign tendency to speak with unabashed reverence about things like freedom and democracy. What’s more, foreigners have adopted the discomforting habit of invoking our national icons and quoting our historic heroes in defense of liberty. President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia and Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki of Poland display easy familiarity with Thomas Jefferson; Lech Walesa as well as Soviet reformers and Romanian rebels cite Abraham Lincoln; Nelson Mandela lays a wreath at the tomb of Martin Luther King Jr., and, in the most dramatic cultural expropriation of all, Chinese students in Tian An Men Square parade a replica of Lady Liberty--herself a gift to the United States from the people of France.

Surely we are all proud that our national symbols, and the values for which they stand, are honored by other peoples. But many Americans also find the practice rather quaint, a kind of unsophisticated incantation by simple-minded foreigners who know our history only superficially and therefore have not yet acquired our worldly attitudes of iconoclasm and, especially, hero-bashing.

Foreign visitors may gaze on the statuary in the Capitol and see the emblems of elemental political forces and powerful cultural values; we see some enmarbled guys--and a few women--whose latter-day handlers managed to pull off a neat media stunt that got them turned into permanent tourist attractions. We know that all those characters pulled their trousers on one leg at a time, that they had their full quota of human frailties, that there are no giants on the earth. Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it surely demystifies. We are too well acquainted with our historical selves to be awed. Perhaps our self-knowledge has robbed us of the capacity to be inspired.

And yet, in an arresting inversion of the behavior that finds our own prophets more honored in other lands, we have recently poured our own adulation unrestrainedly over two visitors from abroad: Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Mandela. Gorbachev’s visit to Stanford University in June elicited the kind of frenzied adoration once tendered only by mobs of pubescent women to rock megastars. In a great university committed to cultivating the domain of reason, all classes were canceled and throngs of jostling, shouting, waving people surged behind the police barricades, aching for a glimpse of the Soviet leader.

Smaller but no less passionate crowds greeted Mandela wherever he appeared. No imaginable American political figure could command such displays of affection and enthusiasm. Indeed, public figures from Jesse Jackson to George Deukmejian clamored to get in the same camera-frame with Mandela and Gorbachev, just to bask in their reflected glory.

Again, Americans are justifiably enthused about Gorbachev’s attempt to reshape Soviet society, and Mandela’s struggle to bring racial justice to South Africa. But why are we so passive and jaded about appeals to modernize our own rickety social infrastructure, or rutted streets and crowded schools? Why are we increasingly so cantankerous and confrontational about our own racial problems? Why so intent on demythologizing all our national heroes, so fiercely resistant to affording to any living American the claim to be able to inspire us?

Just as we find the world’s excitement about our political values to be a kind of flattering curiosity, so do we seem more willing to cheer political change at a distance than close at hand, more apt to lionize the visitors, not the locals.

What’s going on here? Partly, one supposes, we cheer Havel and Gorbachev and Mandela with abandon because we are emotionally invested exclusively in their success. It won’t be for us to suffer the disemployment and inflation and uncertainty and, quite possibly, the violence that will in all likelihood attend their various struggles to transform their countries. For us, their efforts will be gain without pain. At home, in contrast, we sense the real discomfort that change must entail--higher taxes; ragged, tiring argumentation; close, demanding inter-racial dialogue and concessions.

This much history we do know: However attractive democracy might be in the abstract, it has proved a messy and painful business in practice. And that’s why we need periodically to re-trim the vessel that is carrying us on our national journey. The sober idealism of Jefferson and Lincoln and King is weighty ballast for the ship of state, both in stormy seas and in periods, like the present, of sullen calm. We need their visionary captaincy now as much as ever. Those struggling to launch democracies know this, and we who should be trying to stay the course shouldn’t forget it. This is one thing that cannot be taken for granted.

As that black-gowned Welshman said to my students, some things are worth dying for. We may not be called upon to do the actual dying, but if we don’t reckon democracy that kind of value, democracy itself surely will.