Word: bumpers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Memorial Day. Bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Connecticut Turnpike. California families flocking to Lake Tahoe. S.M.U. and Texas University graduates pouring across the causeways into Galveston. Memorial Day: a three-day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose...
...smell of the feeds mixes with the pork smell and the hydrocarbons and the hot dust that blow into the one-room headquarters. Inside, there is a five-foot high, very grainy litho of Wallace with about half a smile, and on a card-table there are the usual bumper stickers, buttons, pamphlets--plus a big pickle jar full of bills and change: Wallace supporters pay for this material...
...Graves: Outside his house is parked an old sky-blue school bus bearing the words "Freewill Independent Baptist Church" and, on the back, bumper stickers: "Jesus Saves," "Have You Read Your Bible Today?" Mr. Graves has the gentle, fearful eyes of a ten-year-old but the brown weathered skin of a life-long construction worker. He seems afraid I will scold him for what he tells me. He mumbles a bit when he says he's for Wallace, but his embarrassment is not doubt. Busing comes up quickly: "You can't change a hundred years--or more I guess...
Because people spend so much time on the road in L.A., actual conversation has been partially replaced by bumper stickers, a way of communicating where you're at even while you're busy zipping down the passing lane with your Alfa wound up to 90 in third gear. You can witness whole bumper dialogues as you drive along: A Volkswagener croons in a feminine-hip voice, HAVE A NICE DAY, a Pontiac GTO with an Orange County dealer's sticker snorts back, p.o.w.s NEVER HAVE A NICE DAY, and a VW bus crammed with hippies answers...
...BELIEVE MUSKIE," the campaign buttons proclaim. "Trust Muskie," read the bumper stickers. Indeed, in a campaign almost totally devoid of real debate over issues, the central theme Senator Edmund Muskie and his staff are striking is that Muskie is honest and can be trusted, no used-car salesman is this "man from Maine." Yet in the final 36 hours before the polls opened in New Hampshire last week. Muskie and his staff were involved in four separate but related incidents of deceit that transformed the placid New Hampshire campaign into a cesspool of low blows and innuendos. Three of these...