One shameful pleasure I've never experienced is being part of an indignant crowd. Just once I'd like to find myself in a frightening mob under the spell of a single coarse sentiment. Down with this, how dare you that, they lied to us, etc etc. I'd like to feel cheap emotion radiate through a horde of strangers and surge through me and know that it's an oversimplification at best and dangerously false but let myself get swept up in it anyway, what the hell. So much of the time I imagine myself on the receiving end of such righteous anger, it would be refreshing to switch sides just once, play on the winning team. Usually I derive sick shivers of enjoyment from imagining myself being chased by angry mobs through the dark labyrinthine streets of an old city, the reflected light of pursuing torches dancing off the canyon-like walls of the forbidding stone buildings, buildings which offer no quarter to the oppressed! My only crime, of course, is that my thoughts have been revealed or discovered. I've always just sort of assumed, my thoughts being what they are, that I would be much more likely to be the fleeing target in such a scenario, but it would be nice to be on the side of enraged sanctimony, just to see what it feels like. Maybe I could cleverly combine the two wishes and work up a daydream in which I'm part of a morally outraged throng chasing me. We'd corner me in a dead end street or against a bridge railing, and I'd be softened by my desperate, impassioned speech in defense of tolerance, freed from my insane bloodlust by the eloquence of my words. The mob as a whole, in fact, would be forced to see things my way, due to the undeniable rhetorical power of my impromptu plea, then we'd all go have drinks together and sing a few songs around an upright piano. Later I'd feel hoodwinked, done in by the desperate chicanery of a known reprobate, and with this awareness my desire for scapegoating would resurface with even greater hostility, but of course by then I would have made my escape.