"Tense Present" was certainly political, and I liked his sort of culminating insistence that insisting on ability on Standard (Written) American English is an intrinsic part of a progressive political stance if you're a teacher of writing. But it's garbage linguistics, and he engages in some really ugly mischaracterization of opponents in what seems to be a covert attempt to justify prescriptivism not as a fait accompli or an accessibility move, but for its own sake, like the "SNOOT" he is upfront about being. In fact, I remember now encountering this essay before I read Infinite Jest, and it being basically the whole basis (along with the bandanna and perhaps the superficially wacky titles of some of his other works) for my initial and very mistaken reading of Wallace as a smarmy, McSweeneysesque, postmodern-lite hack. I have a bit more sympathy now, and I can see him trying to work out and value things that stem from his early upbringing and find ways to value the youthful priggishness that is beyond his control and redounds perpetually (I admit to being not entirely unfamiliar with that feeling myself). But overall I have to agree substantively with LibraryThing luminary Stephen Dodson's assessment (below, although a couple of his specific attacks are wrong, and some others are petty in a way that I think he misreads Wallace slightly as justifying with his (Wallace's) own argument. I see Wallace as uncomfortably trying a little too hard to square an inherited SNOOTy prescriptivism with a progressive politics of language, and Dodson as missing the excruciating subtext and just seeing him as a self-appointed authority):

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000510.php ( )