“For the duration” was a term coined, I believe, during the Second World War to describe the extraordinary measures that had to be taken until the war was over. That included rationing, blackout curtains, a military draft, men away from their homes in dangerous places and women who had to raise children among other women, and women who worked in factories and retail establishments and as government workers and all the women expected to give up their work and take up normal civilian life after the war, which meant getting married, having children and being homemakers. The idea was that things would get back to normal even though it rarely happens when a war ends. The chasm in America today is not only between blacks and whites and college educated and not but also because of the Vietnam War that separated the differences between those who trust the government and those who do not, even though what happened was that the Liberals and what became the Progressives are the more trusting of the government while the Conservatives are the ones who don’t trust to vaccines or elections.
Things changed a lot after the Second World War. To name some of the standard ones, there was the GI Bill of Rights that made the working class college educated and therefore middle class. There were the suburbs where the middle class could live. There were more and more women in the professions and any number of other walks of life, belying the idea that they would stay at home. There were the minority ethnic groups-- the Jews, the Italians, the Blacks, who pushed their ways into prominence. The nation after the war ended was transformed, but it is fair to say that the wartime measures were ended: no ration cards (though the English retained them into the Fifties); no massive draft and the draft done only gingerly and especially in Vietnam because of its political resistance to that), No shortages as America was able to produce for the world until Europe and Japan recovered and built new manufacturing.on their own. The country grew after the duration was over and American society moved on to other things, like television or women freed from reproductive burdens and so to abolish a double standard of sexual activity.
There are other periods to which can be applied “for the duration”. The present coronavirus pandemic is one of these. Some things had to be suspended or applied because of it, such as masks, or limited dining, or communal events like beaches or concert halls, as well as a high rate of deaths, people not being as patient about the temporary circumstances that had to apply as they were willing to do during the Second World War, commentators noting that people became quickly frustrated at their isolation, for example, though I do not note that as a revelation about the nature of people, which is that they need to converse with strangers or just see the faces of people as they walk past. It isn’t human nature that requires it to find the duration so difficult. The privations in World War Two were more onerous. Rather, the explanation seems to me that the political framework has changed from loyalty to distrust. Who the hell are those people telling you what to do? Wearing masks is a privation of liberty and it would be worthless to explain that “liberty” has something to do with political liberty, the ability to vote or to express your opinion, rather than use the public health measures that have been in place to control epidemics for six hundred years now., since the Black Plague.
And so it is even more unsettling for people to find that what was really a short plague year of a year and a half from the time it began in January, 2020, and which peaked in New York that April, when it seemed that there would be no respirators left in New York and we were planning to fill a hospital ship with coronavirus patients, and then the crisis abated, and people began to get vaccinated in January of 2021, expecting it to be all over by summer, when the Delta variant arose and people, especially in the South, were resistant to getting shots. So the duration is longer and it is their own fault. Nobody thought that refusing to get the Sabin vaccine against polio was thought to be a political situation when it became available in 1962 and to be ingested on sugar cubes. Everyone complied as a matter of good sense. Well, uneducated voters went Democratic during the New Deal because it was in their economic and ethnic issues to do so and the unions reminded them of that. What has changed? Are people dumber or less trained or is it the influence of Trump having corrupted the ability to think clearly?
Not every set of events, mind you, lasts only so long as the constraints on them persist, nt solidified with its new customs and beliefs. and so the war and the pandemic are properly to be regarded as being for the duration. Other social changes are not supposed to ever lapse but to have themselves created or altered the new situation. I am thinking of the Civil Rights Movement which once and for all would end the widespread caste system whereby Blacks were exploited and stigmatized. This was to be an ending rather than a dispensation, and so it seemed to happen in that the Voting Rights Bill and the Equal Accomdations Act led to black empowerment and the decrease of overt discrimination. Never again to go back to the old days. This was a permanent improvement. And so it is very unsettling to me that there is an attempt to reverse what seemed the irreversible by restricting voting rights in those Southern states that were the ones that had needed pre-clearance to insure that there was no hanky panky in voting so as to disenfranchise Black and brown peoples, the Civil Rights Era to be thought of as subject for revanchment or some other political term that denotes a reversal of trends rather than the establishment of a new institutional arrangements.
Here is another term for a quality of time that does not suspend time, which is what happens in a duration,or changes social structure crucially and dramatically, such as happens in “revolutions”, though I would not refer to the Civil Rights Movement as a revolution because it was not an attempt to change government but to work within government so as to change the society, revolutions like the Russian and the Cuban Revolutions coming into bad odor even though the American Revolution was a salutary and progressive thing, given that colonists became citizens rather than subjects and government based on the will of the people rather than whomever are the powers that be. Let us just call the Civil Rights Movement as a change agent capable of altering institutions and cultures without violence.
The third term I add is “transition” which is a period during which a society moves from one balance of its forces to another and then restabilizes and perhaps on the equivalent situations that obtained before the transition. Hopefully, the Civil Rights Movement was just a transition between white dominance to another period of white dominance and that does seem unlikely in that the demographic changes will mean that people of color will be the majority minority and that it is the white people who will be in the transition they resent where Black and female faces become everywhere and are not willing to accept that until, eureka, they are everywhere and so inconsequential, as is the case with women U. S. Senators (there are about twenty of them in the hundred person Senate) even if it is true that as of yet women have not broken through the ultimate glass ceiling and become President. Hillary was a transitional figure in that she acclimated the notion of many to a woman President but there was so much animosity towards her that she couldn’t make the final hurdle herself.
A good example of a transitional time is upward mobility for access to higher education. Let us think of that period as encompassing the time when the G I Bill allowed the working class veterans to go to college when before the war maybe only a few percent of college age students got to college. Extend it to the meritocratic years which allowed white ethnics to make it into Ivy League schools in the Fifties through the Eighties, and then consider the restored alignment whereby very expensive tuitions later on meant that elite institutions are recruited from the rich and Affirmative Action candidates, putting aside the middle class and having them go to state rather than private institutions or local rather than national institutions. That new equilibrium makes education less a mechanism for upward mobility rather than a replication of social class, which is what it had been beforehand the transition. Joe Biden is not trying to change that new equilibrium, to either extend or alter the transition period. As laudatory as his goals can be, a free community college system puts people within their social class background so as to get the education they need to hold down the jobs suited to their backgrounds, this time as nurses aides and bookkeepers rather than as the products of vocational high schools whereby working class kids became auto mechanics and printers. The occupations change but the arrangement of the social classes do not and just return to the class hierarchy of the past.But doing that is worth doing so as to staff the new occupations and give people their livings.
Here is another use of the term “for the duration” which refers to the personal rather than societal but also refers to a brief or at least limited period of time when exigencies are necessary but will come to an end. I refer to decisions I make or situations I manage as “for the duration”, which means for so long as I live. A person has a stent put in that will last enough until the person dies. A friend of mine had been rejiggering and replacing his hearing aids, ever frustrated by those dang things, until he died, and so the duration was over. He didn’t have to worry about his hearing aids. I get a dental appliance that will last for the duration, as are my housing arrangements, however pleasant, are different and so somehow temporary, than was the place I lived in for forty years with my wife, that not a suspended duration but the substance of life, of a life, which ended when she died and so moved me into lasting until the duration. Makeshift matters, I surmise, will do for a duration but not satisfactory for a fully lived life. You can be more feeble and less full of your powers or influence or major roles in life, like being a husband or a father or a professor. Rather, things, whether social arrangements or even cultural ones, such as how to manage the latest technology, are jerry rigged or not fully used. It is not necessary to do everything on my cell phone even if I read real books so as to read novels. What will do will do.
Now it is unclear that being under the sway of a duration means me to declutter my life or to get at essentials or that I had progressed to a point where I stopped. I have never gone beyond popular culture when the Eighties took hold though I now get involved with things from the past of that, the Big Band Era, but that was my affinity from the time I was a child, when the Big Band Era was ending. In short, it is to question whether some things are advanced rather than just reduced, and literature does not help me out with that. Dante encapsulated people by the moments of their worst moments and so largely in whatever were the great times in their life. I am wondering how to discuss the terrain that occupies the downward slope that ends when people no longer endure. Do they become wise and serene, like Oedipus? Or nasty, like Sarah? Or more and more distracted, relying on his instincts, like the last few years for FDR, still able to call one off, as to get the best deal possible at Yalta? The future remains a mystery to me. Lear never got old. He just had to deal with altered and diminished circumstances and even had to endure the death of his favorite child, something no one should have to endure and yet happened very late in his life. Either the curse or the bonus of having endured even more.