Aside from eternal questions, the most urgent issue Gilead examines was resolved by the Civil War. In religious terms it was a question of engagement — whether a Christian or any devout believer is required to make specific moral choices and act on them in the real world. In 1850 it was an unavoidable question of conscience: Could a man of God obey the law when the law supported slavery? Ames' ferocious grandfather answered with his blood. Allied with John Brown and the jayhawkers in the Kansas wars, Old Ames fought slavery from the pulpit on Sunday mornings and from the saddle, pistol at the ready, on weekday nights. He fought on in the Civil War, enlisting in the Union Army and losing an eye at Wilson's Creek. His own hero, an evangelist named Theodore Dwight Weld, once preached "every night for three weeks until he had converted a whole doughface settlement to abolitionism."
Old Ames symbolizes an antique righteousness that has been lost. "Doughface" is a word of its time that has also been lost, but may need to be resurrected. "Dough-face Song," by the abolitionist poet Walt Whitman, was published in the New York Evening Post in 1850:
"We are all docile dough-faces,
They knead us with the fist,
They, the dashing southern lords,
We labor as they list....."
In Whitman's poem "dough-face" refers to pliant, cynical congressmen who compromise with slave-state legislators to protect their own interests. In another early poem, "The House of Friends," he vilifies, "Doughfaces, Crawlers, Lice of Humanity." "Doughface" wasn't coined by Whitman, as far as I can tell — it was in general use to describe the morally neutered, the human cipher of no depth or backbone or spirit whose apathy, in Whitman's view, offered comfort to slaveholders and offense to Almighty God.
The doughface will always be with us; in a democracy he's the dead weight the rest of us will always be obliged to carry. But in times of civic peril and critical decision — the 1850s, certainly, and the first decade of the 21st century — doughface inertia becomes a millstone so heavy it can crush a nation's heart. A doughface crisis approaches when public servants commit spectacular outrages that seem to outrage no one; when unbearable truths are evident but widely ignored or rejected; and not coincidentally, when public figures who appear to be imbeciles grin from every wall and page and screen.
Look for the imbeciles. Not long ago I was standing in a checkout line, glancing idly at the usual display of gossip tabloids and celebrity slicks, when the cover of People magazine caught and held my eye. This was before I learned the word "doughface." Yet here were America's doughface princesses staring back at me like two golden lemurs caught in the beam of a primatologist's flashlight. Britney Spears and Mariah Carey. I was startled by their resemblance to each other — and by the paralyzing soullessness that radiated from their photographs.
These were the two most insipid, paint-by-number, vacant-looking blondes I'd seen since the 50s, when beach girls did their hair like Sandra Dee. "Bimbo," which implies a kind of sexual allure, is too good for Spears and Carey. They look like knobs of pale fungus tricked up with bright wigs and cosmetics; their little blue pop-eyes are as expressive as a couple of blueberries poking out of your breakfast muffin. And doughface isn't only skin-deep. Vapid surfaces conceal a more numbing vacancy underneath, as betrayed by the now-famous quote from Spears, the Pillsbury Madonna, in a pensive mood: "Honestly, I think we should just trust our President in every decision that he makes, and we should just support that."I'd be kinder if the fool had kept her mouth shut. People can't be held responsible for their faces nor even, I suppose, for the wasteland that often stretches just behind them. But a doughface book is one you can always tell by its cover, and no words of mine convey Walt Whitman's concept half as forcefully as one glimpse of Britney Spears. A TV show, Access Hollywood, has named Spears "No. 1 Star of 2004," based on the 119 stories it dedicated to her adventures. They used to say that the cream would rise to the top. Today we acknowledge that dough rises, too.
