ing of ways, for the technological advances that makennuclear anxiety possible are also those that promise anmultiplication of options and an enhancement of life.nNuclear anxiety, therefore, threatens us in the same waynthat the impulse-denying ethic of our forefathers did. In anland flowing with milk and honey we are faced with thenprospect of returning to our repressive beginnings. Undernthese circumstances, the drug-dependent lifestyle of manynAmericans implies that the Colombian drug lords havenbecome their true life-affirming and option-multiplyingnchampions. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder against thensame bourgeois conventionality that inspired Walt Whitmannto boast in “Song of Myself” that he wore his hat indoors ornoutdoors, as he pleased. It’s a safe bet, however, that JoenBonanno, a Man of Honor who has always prided himselfnon his sartorial decorum, would never wear his hat indoors.nN uclearnanxiety has reinforced a particular perception ofnreality, according to which, as Lionel Trilling put it innThe Liberal Imagination, “reality is always material reality,nhard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.”nAnd it is this perception of reality that makes it hard tonbelieve in the validity of fixed principles and easy to believenthat the people who have them are either fanatics, hypocrites,nor prisoners within a monstrous deformation ofnconsciousness. That reality, resistant and unpleasant thoughnit may be, is a vale of soul-making, as Keats believed, andnthat character is formed in the world’s torrent, as Goethenbelieved, can be the worst of bad news to those who holdndear to this perception of reality.nUnder these circumstances drugs, especially cocaine,nhave proved to many to be good news. Drugs are a way ofnliving with the nuclear anxiety, which may be nothing lessnthan the anxiety of being, writ large. To the user hounded bynthe necessity of choosing among too many options, thenmessage of drugs is that all options are equal, so that choicenceases to be a problem. Drugs — a substitute for charactern— are in their own way not only a moral equivalent of war,nbut a way of returning to Margaret Mead’s Samoa. For ifnyou can trust the present, as drugs and Mead’s Samoa saynyou can, you don’t need character.nBut as both Heraclitus and Bob Dylan have assured us,nthe times keep on changing so that you can’t step into thensame present twice. Timothy Leary is still into behaviornmodification, but now it is computer games, not LSD. Andnit’s quite possible that those framers of the Oakland manifestonwho did not liberate, themselves into extinction now notnonly wear three-piece suits, but also vote Republican.nPerhaps some of them, having experienced a measure of thenworld’s torrents, have even learned that character formationncan be a liberating response to the anxiety of being, and thatnwithout it the artificial paradise offered by the Colombianndrug lords can be hard to resist.nn’one of the most authoritative and informative newslettersnon the activities of our adversaries on the left.”n—Congressman Phil CranenThe best intelligence network in Washington for anybody who wantsnto keep track of the radical left—that’s what The American Sentinelnhas been for 18 years.nSince we began as “The Pink Sheet on the Left” back in 1971, thenbest informed Conservatives in America have relied on us as a watchdognof the left wing.nAs Senator Jesse Helms said,n”the average American would be appalled if he were suddenly tondiscover what is being done to his country and its principles by extremenleft-wing forces. 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