way to disable ESC == META in viper mode?

[jcduell]

I'm paging in from vim-land, and am trying to get viper mode to work in
a way that I can deal with.  Unfortunately, I've gotten addicted to
mindlessly hitting ESC over and over again in vim (a common affliction
among vi users).  But in viper-mode, if I hit ESC more than once in a
row, it winds up interpreting it as META, so emacs thinks I'm trying to
enter some of meta-meta-meta command.

The viper-mode docs seem to imply that plain old ESC shouldn't map to
META, and that I should need to use \ESC instead.  But I'm not seeing
that.

Does anyone know how I can get it so that I can continue merrily
hitting ESC four times every time I exit edit mode, without these being
interpreted as hits on the  Meta button?