While I really hate people who snort, Not my problem, what a thrilling luxury it is to say it. And not being entrusted with Insider Secrets liberates me to gossip and speculate with the Outsiders. Yesterday, the Corporate Treasurer suddenly resigned a man who d been an Insider for 20 years, a man visibly growing discontent. Two years ago I would have been pulled instantly into the CEO s office to help assess the situation. Yesterday, I received the terse e-mail like everyone else.
Insiders occupy the fat, comfortable mid-section of a bell curve of their own making.
Outsiders run around that fat middle, hating the Inside all the while they long to get it. Timothy McVeigh or Martin Luther King. Jeffrey Dahmer or Oscar Wilde. Roger Clinton or Bill Clinton. It s such a clich now that Hollywood the movie culture that replaced religion in defining the master plots of our lives was built by Outsider Jews who had all the usual routes to the American Dream closed off to them, but I need to keep reminding myself of it.