Look, doughface, it's time to put down the remote control

Let me begin with two images. The first comes from South Africa in 1994 when the first free elections for all people were held in that tragic and beautiful land. You may remember the long, winding snakes of people excitedly waiting to vote. One Catholic nun wrote to us telling of how a friend of hers, an elderly woman, went out and bought a new frock for the occasion. Yes, simply in order to vote.

The second image comes from a new novel, Gilead, by Hemingway Award-winning writer Marilynne Robinson. The book features an extended soliloquy by an ageing American clergyman who remembers how an evangelist friend of his grandfather once preached "every night for three weeks until he had converted a whole doughface settlement to abolitionism".

Interesting word that, "doughface".

It's an old American word that doesn't have an equivalent in modern English. A doughface is somebody who is pliant, lethargic, disengaged and disinterested. Walt Whitman's Doughface Song begins:

We are all docile doughfaces, They knead us with the fist, They, the dashing southern lords, We labor as they list . . .

The question I want to pose on this election day is this: are we becoming a doughfaced nation? Have we become compliant, cynical consumers who blame our political masters for all the ills of our lives? Not only will we not - definitely not - buy a frock/suit in order to dance down to the polling station, we won't even put down the remote control and the bag of crisps for a few minutes to drag our lardy arses down to the local school. Maybe we'll deign to exercise our democratic rights if it's made as easy as voting someone out of the Big Brother house, but if not we won't bother. It's your job, politician, to make it easy for me. Discuss.

It looks as if the Apathy Party will win by a landslide yet again. The easy tendency is to blame the politicians.

After all, they are the sly ones who seduce us with false promises and trot out the party line with such infuriating seriousness that any sentient human wants to hurl a chair at the television screen.

Though I have personally known quite a number of politicians who are committed and genuine, these simplistic and cynical armchair arguments bear a broad-brush truth.

Politicians may blame the media - and there's some truth in that argument as well - but the political process in this country has become corroded and the politicians must shoulder much of the blame.

But not all of the blame. A complicit electorate - aka "us" - has allowed them to get away with it.

When the spotlight turns on us, we, the pure ones, don't look quite so good.

When Archbishop William Temple was berated by an elderly lady about the standard of clergy, the wise man turned to her and said, "I agree. The trouble is that we only have the laity to draw on". In other words, we get the leaders we deserve. (I know, I know. I'm using "we" in much too sweeping a manner, but stay with me for the moment. ) A lot of our protests against politicians are hollow. For instance, we gorge on calories, then take our bodies down to the local surgery and tell the doctor to fix the problems for us.

We also instruct the politicians to spend more on the NHS (though not by taxing us, of course). We raise unruly children, then call for more policemen on the beat to sort out disorderly behaviour. We insist on the unchallengeable right to drive our motor cars anywhere at any time, while blaming our political masters for the consequent environmental mess. Then we denounce them as hypocritical.

Many of the problems in our lives and in wider society simply cannot be "fixed" by politicians, even those - especially those - who promise solutions. Politics has a role to play in terms of providing frameworks and resources, that's all. The Herald picture of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, accompanying the headline news that they still had a "mission to change people's lives", terrified rather than reassured me. I want these messianic characters out of my life. And the notion of Michael Howard offering life prescriptions is a recipe for sleepless nights.

But if we want politicians to be accountable, perhaps we, the great unwashed, should be more accountable ourselves. We rightly hold politicians to the public promises they make. But democracy would be much healthier if we in turn had to make pledges every four years about what we were prepared to do to improve the quality of life in our community. Then the vociferous critics who come on to the radio phone-ins could be challenged: "Mr Smith, you solemnly pledged to run a football team for youngsters in your street.

Have you done that?" Silence at the end of the line.

In Scotland, we are familiar with the historic notion of covenant. In such a contract, there are responsibilities on both sides. A one-sided covenant is a recipe for the familiar blame-game. It's not just the press which is like a harlot, having power without responsibility, it's a lazy and collusive electorate.

Listen. The polls tell us we are about to re-elect a prime minister who led our country into a war for one ostensible reason only - to disarm a dictator with a mighty worldthreatening arsenal. Did Tony Blair lie to us? Pass. What he did do, without question, was to exaggerate and spin like a double-glazing salesman who hypes himself up to believe in his own dodgy product. It was a supine and craven group of MPs which kept him in power. If a man who takes his country into war in this manner is allowed to smile his way back into power, the politics of our land is devalued at a stroke.

What we need is not so much an election as a sweeping revolution in hearts and minds. Without such an enlivening covenant of mutual accountability, a compliant, infantile, doughfaced nation will become the supreme creation of a political and bureaucratic spin-doctoring class which can commit spectacular outrages which outrage no-one, while we close the curtains, turn up the volume with the remote control and munch our way to political brain death.