Counting the days in blazing leaves, honeyed sunshine, and youthful high hopes, Saturday and Sunday were the most glorious autumn weekend I've ever witnessed. Redbud, crabapple, sugar maple, and oak — the trees wore glad rags and danced in a high breeze and the fresh-faced, remarkably well-adjusted-seeming teenagers wore shiny cheeks as they shouted to one another and gamboled with loose limbs across campus.
Welcome to Family Weekend at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
On Friday, parents and a few whispering and overawed grandparents were invited into the classrooms of the Academy Building (the fourth Academy Building, constructed in 1915 to a design by Ralph Adams Cram of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson after the third Academy Building burned down) to observe boarding school academics in action and glow with pride. I sat obediently without making any embarrassing remarks upon my white folding chair as the kids discussed Marilyn Nelson's poem "A Wreath for Emmett Till" in 12th-grade English and Karl Marx's "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844" in a history class called Capitalism and Its Critics.
Karl Marx says that the capitalist system creates distractions that veil our own political and economic reality. Karl Marx says that these distractions might include the pursuit of material comforts, religion, and the illusion of class mobility.
I'm a believer in the veil of distraction. It seems to me blatantly obvious that Marx was correct on that score, anyway.
Contemporary capitalism, as Marx predicted, has indeed produced plenty of mechanisms that veil us from recognizing our own political and economic reality. Enumerated in the terms of today, we might include among these distractions the pursuit of online shopping, Instagram envy-scrolling of others' vacations on Capri and in St. Barth's, the illusion that we might win Lotto and be saved from credit card debt, the religious fervor of football fandom, and, in the case of parents of high school seniors like me, the months-long deep dive down into — way down into — the never-ending sea of minutiae associated with the college admissions process.
College admissions is definitely part of the global capitalist system limned by Marx.
Just ask the high school seniors in Capitalism and Its Critics up at Exeter. They'll tell you more eloquently than I can. They might even use a more impressive word than "limned."
I'm not the only parent in my circle who has plunged far, far down into the deep and murky water of college application podcasts, college marketing-pamphlet reading, and Reddit opinion perusing, while the great drama of Trump versus Harris plays out in the news. The college applications of October have proven a wonderfully convenient way to, metaphorically, throw our hands over our eyes and ears as Nov. 5 rushes toward our face.
On Saturday, Nettie and I traveled to upstate New York to visit Colgate, Syracuse, and Cornell universities, the last three stops on the Great College Tour of 2024. Over every hill in Madison County and Chenango County we exclaimed at the beauty of a new valley as it came into view, the hillsides a patchwork of butter-yellow, crimson, and pumpkin-orange. Amish buggies drawn by horses were the only vehicles on the road outside of Lebanon, N.Y.
If it were I, and not Nettie, making the decisions, I'd spring into action to take the advice of a gray-haired member of the class of 1965 whom we met in the Memorial Chapel (neo-Classical, 1917) and apply "early decision" to Colgate. The elder from the class of 1965 whom we met in the chapel was wearing a maroon cap with a Colgate "C" and carrying a cane. He came with an entourage in his wake of two further generations of Colgate graduates who, judging by their resemblance, were his daughter and granddaughter. The Princeton Review once voted Colgate the Most Beautiful Campus in America, and I agree. It wins my prize, aesthetically and arboreally speaking. They say the snow is deep in the Chenango Valley winter, but that the buildings on campus are all heated by a giant, hidden, wood-fired furnace.
Doesn't that sound cozy?
Nettie has had trouble deciding on her "E.D." (as we college-admissions buffs say in the lingo). One day it's Duke, the next it's Colgate, then it swings to Virginia or a college out west. It occurs to me that I might be glad she was tucked away someplace rurally remote, safe, and cozy if the storm comes. High atop a hill, in a stone building heated by locally harvested firewood.
And, yes, I've quoted Karl Marx in my column this week because it makes me LOL — actually chuckle aloud to myself, startling the sleeping dog to my right — to think that there are residents of East Hampton who write Letters to the Editor of this newspaper who will genuinely believe my referring to Karl Marx here actually makes me the Marxist they accuse Kamala Harris and Tim Walz of being.
Wocka, wocka!, as Fozzie Bear said on "The Muppets." Or was it Groucho Marx who said "wocka wocka"? I'm not a Marxist. I'm a member of the Groucho Party.
I may regret this joke in newsprint if things go poorly in November and the paddy wagon comes for me as an Enemy of the People. But we'll be laughing in the paddy wagon, I guess.