Word: bumpers
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...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...
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...
...sort of documentary of Bumper's last three days before retirement, the book tends to be a bit ostentatious in such honesties, as if they established Bumper's credibility. In the end, Wambaugh sentimentalizes Bumper as a sort of repellently lovable supercop who, whenever he is not strongarming "pukepots," is bantering in Yiddish, Spanish or Arabic with the ethnics on the beat...
Oddly, some most persuasive moments occur when Bumper sits down to consume one of the Lucullan meals he regularly cadges. Wambaugh's feeling for food is almost erotic. Thus as Bumper takes dessert in an Arab restaurant: "I scooped up a mouthful and let it lay there on my tongue, tasting the sweet apricot and lemon rind, and remembering how Yasser's wife, Yasmine, blended the apricot and lemon rind and sugar, and folded the apricot puree into the whipped cream before it was chilled...