I am now writing in the present tense.

Is there a less useful form of grammar than the present tense? The question should not be dismissed lightly. The present tense has its place in technical writing -- instruction manuals, textbooks, and such -- in specialized writing such as screenplays, and, I must admit, in blogs such as this one. But in everyday conversation about the only time you use it is when you're talking on a cell phone, where it results in some of the least scintillating conversation in human history. ("I'm in the supermarket. I'm looking at the scallops. Okay, now I'm heading toward the macaroons.") Its other big conversational use is as an incorrect substitute for various forms of the future tense. ("I'm going to Fred's house. We're having scallops and macaroons.")

And in fiction it is almost inevitably used as a cheap device to create a phony sense of immediacy by authors who have yet to realize that A) the present tense only draws attention to the fact that the action is not happening in the present moment, and b) every work of fiction begins with the unspoken phrase, "Once upon a time," which immediately demands the past tense.

But without a doubt the worst misuse of the present tense is done by historians and other experts in TV documentaries. One can scarcely turn on PBS, or the History Channel, or TLC, or any of the dozens of other documentary-centric time fillers on basic cable, without encountering some lunkhead with a master's degree babbling on about how "Lincoln senses the Union is in danger, and that night he orders a meeting of his cabinet" or "Octavius sends his fleet to the Ionian Sea, because he knows Mark Antony's forces are sailing out to attack him." Really? Those things are happening even as you speak? Do you live in a bilocated temporal zone or what?

Yet this deplorable practice has become de riguer. You hardly ever see a talking head talking about the past in the past tense anymore. I have reached the point where I'm ready to seek out some of these pundits and whomp them with a sack of horse manure. Don't any of these yo-yo's realize that when you speak of past events in the present tense, you are making a colossal grammatical error? And these people are supposed to be educators? Sheesh.