We are a nation of ambitious people, and yet ambition is a quality that is hard to praise and easy to deplore. It's a great engine of American creativity, but it also can be an unrelenting op-pressor, which robs us of time and peace of mind. Especially in highly prosperous periods—periods like the present—it becomes fashionable to question whether ambition has gotten out of hand and is driving us to excesses of striving and craving that are self-destructive. Ambition is not, of course, only a quest for riches. The impulse pervades every walk of life. Here is Al Gore straining to be president—campaigning earnestly without any apparent joy—to fulfill an ambition that must date to his diaper days. And does anyone really believe that the fierce rivalry among America's immensely rich computer moguls (from Microsoft's Bill Gates to America On-line's Stephen Case) is about money? What it concerns is the larger ambition, harbored by all, to control the nation's cyberagenda.
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