Moral Behavior is Not Nice

My father is a big fan of Louis L’Amour and his Westerns. Once I was old enough to appreciate Mr. L’Amour’s books, he shared that love with me. I started with The Cherokee Trail and The Proving Trail (neither of which are related, despite both using “trail” in the title). Not long after I finished these, my father recommended Last Stand at Papago Wells to me, saying that it had a “good line” in it I should read.

As usual, he was right. It was a good line and I did need to read it.

Last Stand at Papago Wells takes place in the Arizona desert. Logan Cates is the main hero of the tale and he is headed to Yuma Crossing, but he is not the only one. A band of soldiers with a rescued settler girl are also on their way there, as are Jennifer Fair and Grant Kimbrough, both of whom are eloping in an attempt to escape her father, “Big Jim” Fair. There is also a posse out chasing a Pima Indian – Tony Lugo – and his white friend Jim Beaupre, who killed a young man looking to score points in town. Lonnie Foreman joins up with Jennifer and Kimbrough after they come upon his companions slain and mutilated by the Apache.

Churupati is leading the raiding parties and they are not kind in their killing, for to watch men die was one of the sports that the Native American tribes enjoyed long before settlers came. All of the above characters need water and so make for a “rock tank” or tinaja where water gathers in the desert. The disparate personalities of these people and the attacks of the Apache mean the separate groups must band together if they are to survive. Logan Cates is elected their leader and sets about preparing for a siege. Escape across the desert is not possible as this is the only source of water within miles – it would take days to reach the others, and with the Apache in pursuit, days would be shortened to hours.

Early in their stay at Papago Wells, Cates and Jennifer talk. Cates is not impressed with Kimbrough and he asks the young woman why she wants to marry the former soldier. Jennifer finds herself defending Kimbrough, something that she dislikes, and so she tries to shut down Cates with: “He’s a gentleman. He has breeding.”

“So has his horse...but I wouldn’t pick him to ride in this country,”1 Logan Cates replies.

Later comes the line which my father wished me to read. But really, the best way to read it is to read the paragraph leading up to it,. It is Cates’ response to Jennifer when she notes that he does not approve of her. I will reproduce Cates’ words here:

“What is there to approve of? You are beautiful, of course, yet you resent the very things that made life easy for you. You resent your father. From the summit of the molehill of your Eastern education you judge the mountain of the obstacles your father faced. You” –he turned away from her– “are like the froth on beer. You look nice but you don’t mean anything.”2

“You are like the froth on beer.” Oh, how the feminists would scream and whine over that “insult”! Yet it is not an insult. It is a cold, hard fact; at this point in the story, Jennifer means nothing. She resents her father for killing a handsome young man whom she admired when he stopped off at their ranch when she was young. For this she seeks to leave the southwest and to marry a man with “good breeding,” which Kimbrough has, essentially to get revenge on her father when she does not understand him.

But Kimbrough, despite all his good breeding, is a gambler. He has gambled away his own fortune and part of the reason he seeks to marry Jennifer is because of the money he will receive through her from her father’s estate. This is what Jennifer does not realize; “Big Jim” Fair would be right, according to the moral order, for killing Kimbrough as he killed that handsome young man (who was a hired gun sent to murder him) because Kimbrough is stealing his daughter – and his money.

That is not nice of Jim Fair, and today, it would get him labeled a sexist bigot, or something. But morality does not care about nice; as acquaintances of mine have pointed out, nice is not good. Jennifer is nice when she begins this book – but she is not good. Kimbrough is nice but far from good. That is what Cates means when he says Jennifer is “like the froth on beer” and that she “looks nice” but “doesn’t mean anything.” In the moral order, particularly in the desert where survival is paramount, nice is cheap. Good matters far more.

All of this puts Logan Cates solidly in the category of what TV Tropes call “Good Is Not Nice,” since he is “asocial and sometimes downright rude...may refuse to explain anything or listen to anyone...Yes, [he’ll] always be there for [everyone]. But [he doesn't] always seem to like [them].”

At Crisis Magazine, Leila Miller makes this same distinction about goodness and niceness, relating how a friend she trusted because she was so “holy” led her down the path to mortal sin. This lasted for a decade. What finally broke her friendship with this young woman – Marianne – was a conversation that went like this:

She spoke proudly of this friend, describing the young woman’s choice to abort her child nearly halfway through the pregnancy. “She was so prayerful, Leila. It was so beautiful. She waited patiently, doing nothing in haste, because it was such an important decision. She prayed for months to make extra sure that she would choose the best and loving option. She finally did discern God’s will—that terminating the pregnancy was the right thing to do. It was just not the right time for her to have a baby.”

While her eyes glowed with admiration, I remember that my blood ran cold. For all my sins of scarlet, I knew that abortion was the murder of an unborn child. Marianne had just told me that God affirmed the second-trimester killing of a child created in His own image. Her “nice” demeanor in describing a pre-meditated child murder was the same as it had been with me on that fateful high school day.

But this time I challenged her. I told her that we were Catholic, that she knew better, and that I thought she was pro-life! She assured me with no sense of irony that she was completely pro-life but that she could not interfere with others’ choices and where God led them. My eyes were opened to the evil, and I was horrified. Marianne fell off her pedestal that day, shattering into a thousand pieces. Though there was minimal contact going forward, I did learn that she began living with a man, smoking weed, and embracing leftist causes. We eventually never spoke again.

“Nice” is the froth on the beer of spirituality as well as of physicality. For Marianne looked quite nice, quite reassuring, to the point she convinced Ms. Miller to remain in sin for at least a decade. Nice is not good, it is not kind, it is NOT loving.

Yes, there should be a modicum of tact used when you tell someone the truth. Yes, sometimes you can only nibble around the edges to tell someone that they need to work on something more in order to improve, as being too direct and too blunt can crush them. “The bruised reed he shall not break, and smoking flax he shall not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth,” as Isaiah said.

There is indeed a time for tact, a time for delicacy. Yet there is also a time to realize you are neither someone’s mother, father, teacher, nor mentor. Times that you are constrained to care for yourself first and cannot take care of everyone else, or let them call you away from things you must do. Holiness does not require feelings – feelings are “nice.” Holiness and morality requires actions and words, while understanding that you do not always know what words or actions may break someone. When clearly dealing with a bruised reed or smoldering flax, it is sometimes best to do what you can where you can and let the Lord do the rest.

But at other times, as Logan Cates notes in Last Stand, you have to face a stark choice and see yourself as you really are. Kimbrough, in part through Cates’ blunt words, has to face the fact that he is a broken man who will gamble his life away no matter what money or wealth he acquires. L’Amour tells us Kimbrough hated this about himself and, moreover, hated Cates for making him look at his reflection straight on.

“Nice” lets us avoid looking at the mirror of our souls so we can remain in stasis or in sin. To be “nice” rather than speaking tactfully, delicately, or not at all is to use one’s powers to, as Ms. Miller points out, “be an accessory to another’s sin” – or to commit our own sins.

Where in the Bible does it say love is “nice,” or that loving one’s enemies means not hurting their “feelings”? Not once does God say to be “nice.” There is a time to be gentle, to be tactful and diplomatic, or to remain silent rather than break a bruised reed.

But there is also a time to silently stand shoulder-to-shoulder with someone under attack to show the victim is not alone. There is a time to be blunt, a time to be coarse, even, if that is what it takes to preserve the moral order. Decades of “nice” tactics have resulted in the present moral disorder of the West as its true moral order has been hollowed out in its hallowed institutions, including the Church, and it has cost not only lives but souls.

“Nice” is gone. It is time to be good. To be moral. To be the beer, not the froth. Froth doesn’t go to heaven.

Good beer does. So go be the good beer.

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1 Louis L’Amour, Last Stand at Papago Wells, (New York: Bantam Books, 1985), page 34.

2 Ibid, page 46.