A couple of days ago, I wrote about a New York Times article hot off the presses.  in 1989.  Not to be left ahead, the  Wall Street Journal reports that there are a  huge  number of federal crimes and they  largely ignore the existence of mens rea.

Shocking.  At least this was shocking the first few times around.

Perhaps there were large white areas in these papers that needed filling.  Perhaps the reporters were new and hadn’t heard that these issues had been thoroughly covered before.  But then, perhaps these issues deserved to be revisited and I’ve been unkind in lambasting these reports.

While there is nothing new about the issues, or the underlying problems, it remains that they are still a blight on our legal system, and our society, that has yet to be cured.  Sure, we know about the problems, but whoever said that knowing the problem was half the battle was wrong.  A start, but we’re nowhere near solving the problems. 

The expectation that people remember is, sadly, no longer reasonable.  People don’t remember.  Whether it has to do with their attention span or retention span, I can’t say, but they don’t seem to have much capacity to recall that we have problems that remain unresolved.  Whether people will remember these articles after the iPhone 5 comes out has yet to be seen.  I’m not sanguine about it.

Then there are the n00bs, the people who have just discovered that there is a big world out there with a bunch of important issues worthy of their attention.  Maybe the discovery came about because some aspect of it touched their lives.  Maybe they tripped over it.  No matter.  Today, they know.

The problem is that the n00bs never look back.  Just because they had the epiphany today doesn’t mean that it’s band, spanking new.  Like television reruns, if you never saw it before, it’s new to you.  Well, that doesn’t make it new to the rest of us.  Think of new parents, like nobody ever had a baby before them and they have invented the concept.  And they must tell us about it at unbearable length.

The issues raised by the Times and WSJ are important.  And they remain important.  And there are likely a great many people who either paid no attention the first (few) times around, or have forgotten, or weren’t there to pay attention because they were too busy cruising in their huggies.  Whatever, the problems are of a sufficient magnitude to justify another airing.

To the extent I was critical because these aren’t exactly cutting edge newsy issues, I now think I was wrong.  It was the curmudgeon in me, but not every article is written for curmudgeons.

That doesn’t mean that the writers couldn’t have put in a line or two about the fact that these are long-standing problems, problems that have defied ready solution, or problems that have festered for decades.  Doesn’t anybody learn about George Santayana anymore?

Still, better that these issues get space in the papers than a generation forget, or never know, they exist.

And Francisco Franco is still dead.  Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.