Common Sense Presentism

Bill's position is that philosophical presentism is a substantive thesis: what no longer exists does not exist at all, and what does not yet exist does not exist at all.  Much hinges on the distinction between not existing and not existing at all, which no one seems able to clarify.  Instead I propose 'common sense presentism'.  This is not so much a thesis as a practice.  Namely, the practice of speaking of past things and events using the past tense and eschewing the present.  In his latest piece on this topic Bill says,

Two points. First, what was has an ontological status superior to that which never was -- which has no ontological status at all. Second, what was, though logically contingent at the time of its occurrence, is now in a sense necessary, but without ceasing to be logically contingent. The mere passage of time works a modal promotion, from contingency to necessitas per accidens, accidental necessity. Socrates freely drank the hemlock, hence his drinking was logically contingent. But once past, the deed cannot be undone by god or mortal, chance or fate. Cannot. Under the aspect of eternity, however, the heroic act remains logically contingent.

It strikes me that to speak of a past thing or event using the present tense is to beg the question against the presentist.  It presumes that the thing or event has some sort of present existence.  And just what does Bill mean by assigning an 'ontological status' to a thing or event?  Let's take a concrete instance of Bill's general statement.  For example, 

Julius Caesar has an ontological status superior to that of Sherlock Holmes.

I suspect that the names here are being mentioned not used.  We are not ascribing properties to objects or setting objects in some relation.  There are no such objects.  Instead we are reminding ourselves that 'Julius Caesar' names a long gone historical personage whereas 'Sherlock Holmes' names a character in a work of mere fiction, and the former outranks the latter in 'ontological status'.  Likewise, by ascribing 'accidental necessity' to the event of Socrates drinking the hemlock we remind ourselves of the historicity of this occurrence.  That Holmes played the violin has no such historicity.  To talk of undoing an historical event is to make a category error.  The temporal locus of change and its contingency or necessity is the present and the present alone.  Only ongoing events possess any 'modal status'.  Of course, once an event is no longer ongoing we can refer to the modal status it possessed while ongoing.  But this requires the past tense.  Socrates drinking the hemlock was a contingent event. It isn't now anything, let alone necessary.

Elsewhere in this piece Bill makes much of the apparent conflict between the implications of presentism and

the widespread commonsensical intuition that 'has been' is better than and therefore different from 'never was.' 

But it seems clear from his examples that the intuition in question is that it is better to be able to look back on a life of achievement and incident than otherwise.  This is a matter of human psychology.  How is it relevant to our understanding of time?