Letters.

-- After reading Jonah Goldberg's "Ozzy Without Harriet" (June 1717), I watched The Osbournes for the first time, and it wasn't the anti-drug campaign that Mr. Goldberg describes.

MTV is making serious drug abuse something to laugh about, and The Osbournes does not show the reality of such abuse. Most addicts do not spend their lives in Beverly Hills, but on the streets of America, struggling to stay alive. Their lives are miserable, not funny.

Osbourne does look pathetic, but this won't discourage kids. MTV, the company that invented trash reality shows and glorifies teenage promiscuity, has once again trivialized a serious subject. To say that MTV is finally on the "right side of the culture wars" is almost laughable.

William Selber

Austin, Tex.

-- Ramesh Ponnuru is to be commended for his accurate summarization of FrFrank S. Meyer's political philosophy ("The Fusionist," June 17). However, in his muddled attempt to challenge Meyer, he exposes himself as one of the types of heretic about whom Meyer eloquently warned his fellow conservatives.

Meyer understood that truth can be promoted only by the beliefs and actions of committed individuals, not the mystical operations of reified abstractions such as "society" or "contemporary culture." This understanding inspired the conservative movement, and the results were definitive -- not "arguable," as Mr. Ponnuru states.