The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen

visual grotesqueness of it, the filmmakers included nearly a minute of footage of grownups in tuxedos and cocktail dresses rock-and-roll dancing at a social club. In a disappointed tone, as if to suggest just how oppressive the town was, Kuralt reported that the number of tough kids and drinkers at the high school was “ very low,” and although he allowed that a “minority twenty percent” of sixteen-year-olds did place high value on intelligence, he was quick to inject a note of Orwellian portent: “That kind of thinking can imperil your social standing at Webster High.”
    The film wasn’t entirely wrong about Webster High in the mid-sixties. My brother Tom, though not one of the film’s 688 eponymous sixteen-year-olds (he was born a year late), remembers little about his high-school years besides accumulating good grades and drifting in social backwaters with all the other nonsoshies; his main recreation was bombing around with friends who had cars. Nor was the film wrong about the town’s prevailing conservatism: Barry Goldwater had carried Webster Groves in 1964.
    The problem with 16 was tonal. When Kuralt, with a desperate grin, asked a group of Webster Groves parents whether a civil rights march wouldn’t maybe “sort of inject some life into things around here,” the parents recoiled from him as if he were insane; and the filmmakers, unable to imagine that you could be a nice person and still not want your sixteen-year-old in a civil rights march, cast Webster Groves as a nightmare of mind control and soulless materialism. “Youth dreams, we had believed, of adventure,” Kuralt voice-overed. “But three-quarters of these teenagers listed astheir main goal in life a good-paying job, money, success. And we had thought that, at sixteen, you are filled with yearning and dissatisfaction. But ninety percent say they like it in Webster Groves. Nearly half said they wouldn’t mind staying here for the rest of their lives .” Kuralt laid ominous emphasis on this final fact. The most obvious explanation for it—that CBS had stumbled onto an unusually congenial community—seemed not to have crossed his mind.
    The film’s broadcast, on February 25, 1966, drew so many angry phone calls and letters from Webster Groves that the network put together an extraordinary hour-long follow-up, Webster Groves Revisited, and aired it two months later. Here Kuralt came as close to apologizing as he could without using the word “sorry.” He offered conciliatory footage of soshies watching the February broadcast and clutching their heads at the pompous things they’d said on camera; he conceded that children who grew up in safe environments might still become adventurers as adults.
    The core value in Webster Groves, the value whose absence in 16 most enraged its citizens, was a kind of apolitical niceness. The membership of First Congregational may have been largely Republican, but it consistently chose liberal pastors. The church’s minister in the 1920s had informed the congregation that his job was “clinical,” not personal. (“The successful minister is a psychoanalyst,” he said. “If that thought shocks you, let me tell you that Jesus was the master psychoanalyst of all time. Can a minister do better than follow Him?”) In the 1930s, the lead pastor was a fervid socialist who wore a beret and smoked cigarettes while riding to and from the church on a bicycle. He was succeeded by an Army combat veteran, Ervine Inglis, who preached pacifism throughout the Second World War.
    Bob Roessel, the son of a local Republican lawyer, grew up going to the church under its socialist pastor and spent his summers with an uncle in New Mexico who administered the Federal Writers’ Project in the state for the Works Projects Administration. Traveling around the Southwest, Roessel fell in love with Navajo culture and decided to become