Why subjunctive?

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:20 PM -0400 8/12/10, Ronald Butters wrote:
>HELP! SOMETHING IS NOT COMPUTING HERE IN MY BRAIN. I don't
>understand how saying "If ever there WAS a place in need of more
>comedy, and less comity" would make the grammar in line with the
>meaning. I can't see the "if" clause as anything other than
>counterfactual.

But the antecedent isn't "if ever there was~were a place in need of
more comedy and less comity than the Senate", which would render the
whole sentence completely incoherent:

"If ever there was/were a place in need of more comedy and less
comity than the Senate, it's the Senate"

Rather, the meaning is more like
"If ever there was/were a place in need of more comedy and less
comity (than it actually has), the Senate would be one such place".
And my assumption, as mentioned earlier, is that the writer is
presupposing that there such places do exist; or at the very least
that their non-existence is not presupposed.  (You can't presuppose
that there's no such place and assert that the Senate is one, and the
force of the sentence is to assert that the Senate needs more comedy
etc.)

So this is much like "If there was~were ever a time/reason to vote
for this proposal, it's...", where the prescriptive edict (FWIW)
would dictate "was" rather than "were", unless the speaker is
presupposing there was never such a time or reason, a presupposition
inconsistent with the force of the consequent.

LH

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