On Daily Kos, Snoopydog’s post about his life as a page brought back some weird flashbacks of how early the class struggle begins - and how chibi-elitism can be fetishized by all the adults around.

I’m not sure when I first heard of congressional pages. I lived in a dismally backward rural area, so it was probably later than most. What I do remember is that in early high school, I associated pages with debutantes. It was something that classy people did, and therefore I wanted to do it, too. For some sad reason I didn’t make the jump from “rich people get to do this” to “patronage position”: I thought I would apply, and that my grades, test scores, and perhaps an essay question would be reviewed by some committee.

My hopes were raised when the daughter of the posh family in town actually became a summer page. Before the likelihood of becoming a page was about as likely as a prince on a white horse trotting up to the porch of my house. Suddenly being a page was something real people actually did.

If I respected the laws of reality, I would have applied to be a page, all my hopes and dreams would have been crushed, and I would have accepted my fate as a Dollar Store check-out girl. However, I found a way to beat the system. Through a weird, twisty, outright outre series of events I got a save-the-po’-folk scholarship to a D.C. prep school for a year, and they placed their students as congressional interns (yep - like Monica Lewinski was a White House intern). So while my hometown’s prissy prom queen was a page for a summer, I was an intern actually doing staff work for a year. It was a “world turned upside down” moment, and it’s an experience I’ve treasured for many years.  

There’s a few things I’d like to underscore here. First, pages aren’t the only kiddies running around Capitol hill.  They’ve achieved a symbolic status, probably precisely because they are beneficiaries of patronage. They’re not just working in the center of political power, they are scions of wealth and/or privilege. Before Monica, did anyone  ever speculate on the sex life of scantily dressed congressional interns? Youth and beauty isn’t enough - pages represent flirtation (pun absolutely intended) with power.  It’s naughty, it’s dangerous, and it possibly has a skull-and-bones-esque sort of elite cultishness.

And who wants to bet the slobbering voyeuristic public is solely interested in the seduction and/or sexploits of pages? Go into the XXX section of any shady video store two months from now, and I’ll be there will be titles like “Pages Gone Wild”.

While I was an intern, I didn’t see anything untoward going on (though it’s possible I just wasn’t anyone’s type). It might be worth casting the net a little wider to all the Congress-kiddies. I have a feeling, though, that the public is just interested in the pages - for the exact same reason  our wayward elected officials are. There’s a romance about being a page, and they’re easy to fetishize.