the Mail.

In his review of my book Shows About Nothing (September), Paul Cantor makes two misleading assertions. First, that I, yearning nostalgically for a more innocent America, make "highly selective" use of evidence such as the optimistic films of Frank Capra while neglecting darker visions of America. But I spend more time talking about film noir than Capra, and where I praise contemporary film for suggesting ways beyond nihilism, I celebrate not a return to Capra but a recovery of the motifs of noir.

Second, Cantor identifies me as a "right-wing" critic of pop culture. To make this tag stick, he must depict me as a defender of so-called traditional values and claim, for example, that I wish comedy would return to the America of "I Love Lucy." But Cantor ignores my fundamental thesis, stated at the outset and restated in each subsequent chapter (it's even on the dust jacket), that Hollywood's target is not, as critics like Michael Medved think, traditional values, but rather Enlightenment suppositions about freedom, reason, and the dignity of the individual, suppositions that are in large measure shared by the Right and the Left. Cantor never sees the need to so much as mention this thesis.

Thomas Hibbs Boston College

Samuel Huntington and Georgie Anne Geyer ("The Special Case of Mexican Immigration," December) did the usual imperialist thing--they assumed that people migrating north from Mexico were immigrants. After the War of U.S. Imperialism and Colonization (taught in the U.S. as the Mexican War) Anglo-Americans migrated to the northern frontier of Mexico and the Spanish Empire in the Americas. It isn't the Mexican who is the immigrant. It is the Anglo.

Native New Mexicans, Indio or Hispano, have been there since the early 1600s. So why shouldn't they be allowed to live there and to speak their own language? Why shouldn't they be allowed to continue living their lives outside of the "Americanization" (read "McDonaldizing" or "Wal-Martization") that other U.S. citizens suffer from?

R. H. Gaylor Kishwaukee College

Many thanks for Karl Zinsmeister's overview of immigration (BIRD'S EYE, December). One vital aspect he didn't touch on: the political implications. Seeing the demographic handwriting on the wall, the GOP has been trying to match the Democrats in ...