Preterit & Subjuctive Tensions in America

[Lear's Fool Cat]

http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1473

                    O, yes,
                    I say it plain,
                    America never was America to me,
                    And yet I swear this oath--
                    America will be!

                    Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
                    The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
                    We, the people, must redeem
                    The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
                    The mountains and the endless plain--
                    All, all the stretch of these great green states--
                    And make America again!

A cat looking at a King? Good Luck for Kings, but not for all the King's
men and all the King's fools in America. Why you so WEIRD, Sista? 

  Yes, tension dear King. 
  The tension is in the Nature of the thing. 
  It's what makes for a Marriage (Blake's heaven&hell) or a
  Ring (Schopenhauer's voice in Wagner's, says Nietzsche). 
  And tension is the whole Bow and Arrow and String. 
  That's how  Heraclitus gave existence to things, like dancers or
boxers
  or cocks in a ring, like  P-listers sometimes 

(is it worse or better when it rhymes?). 

  Things exist only so far as they embody a tension. 
  So the world is at war or in conflict, but don't worry, it
  is simply the way of things. 

  It is how babies are born and how seeds become
  corn and how America is America, after all. It is tension in
  the  U.S. Constitution, that secures liberty and gives rise
  to the fall of Kings. A tension of competing interests. Now that's
very
  Machiavellian. 

  But what happens when the tension is broken,
  dear King? 


  Oswald says, "If I had a monopoly out, they would have part
  on't."

  AND 

  It's a cold and brave new world Nuncle;
  I'm cold and hungry, dirty and ragged too;
  but Blake is reading his prophecy;
  and I can't clean it up for you;

  Here's another: 


  When priests are more in word than matter;
  When brewers mar their malt with water;
  When nobles are their tailors' tutors,
  No heretics burn'd, but wenches' suitors;
  When every case in law is right,
  No squire in debt nor no poor knight;
  When slanders do not live in tongues,
  Nor cutpurses come not to throngs;
  When usurers tell their gold i' th' field, 
  And bawds and whores do churches build:
  Then shall the realm of Albion
  Come to great confusion.

 Then comes the time, who lives to see't,
 That going shall be us'd with feet.
 
 This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time.


  Very tricky that Fool, who does, by the way, in one sense,
  live before Merlin, the play being a history by Shakespeare and thus
  full of fabulous nonsense sounds and fury and fools and idiots too. 

  we call it a history play and the first four lines describe the
  situation in England during Shakespeare's life, but the next
  six describe some impossible utopian England that tosses
  Albion (England) into great confusion when those that live
  to see it will walk with their feet.

  Kinda reminds me of TRP, in fact TRP seems to have much in
  common with Shakespeare. Perhaps it's the tension. 
  Agonistic P!