Suddenly Everyone Drives a Bronco
When did everyone start driving a Ford Bronco?
I see them everywhere — vintage Broncos, spanking-new Broncos, drop-top Broncos, black, white, Army green Broncos. Everywhere I look, it’s like suddenly they’re out on parade. Before this year, the only thing that came to mind when I thought of a Ford Bronco was O.J. Simpson’s infamous low-speed car chase circa 1994. Now — for some inexplicable reason — they’re the car of the moment.
Yesterday, while enjoying my favorite Bahn Mi at Mitchell’s Deli in East Nashville, a young woman pulled up in a restored turquoise blue Bronco with the top down. When I asked how long she’d owned it, she proudly said she’d had it for 12 years, her grandfather used to fix them up on the side, and she’d purchased it with her own money from a guy in Chicago. Now, she said, people stop her on the street and offer her cash. The highest bid so far, she’d said, was $250,000.
What gives? Why, after years of O.J.-induced infamy, has the Bronco suddenly exploded in popularity?
First, you can blame the economics of supply and demand. In 1996, Ford made a strategic decision to discontinue manufacturing Broncos. (I wonder if O.J. had anything to do with that death? Bad joke? Too Soon? I digress.) Two-door SUVs weren’t in demand, Ford said. But in 2021, after a 25-year hiatus, Ford brought the model back with an updated body style. Just check out the Google search terms for “Ford Bronco” compared to “Jeep Wrangler” over the last five years, and you can see the sudden interest in early 2020 when the decision was announced.
You can also see how quickly interest returned to normal pre-announcement level. In other words — all those cars I’m seeing on the road right now are the result of the spike in interest nearly two years ago. Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you had no idea that Ford had discontinued the Bronco in 1996, but suddenly you’re seeing them all over the place, and catch yourself wondering — Should I be a person who owns a Bronco? But I also understand that once I notice a trend, the trend is likely almost over.
Trends are a fascinating psychological phenomenon. Famed social-cognitive psychologist Albert Bandera performed an experiment in 1968 with children who'd expressed they were afraid of dogs. After watching another child happily play with a dog, 67 percent of the test-case children were willing to play with the dog, too. In other words — we mimic what we see. (Bandura performed a far more menacing study called the Bobo Doll experiment, which proved this in a negative case, as well.)
We watch one another for cues on what is “allowed” and what is “cool.” Trends offer a mental shortcut to what is “in” and what is “out.” So — see you later side part, the middle part is ‘in’. So long skinny jeans, hello wide-legged pants and bell bottoms. Have you noticed the sudden prevalence of fanny packs? Honestly, it’s almost comical the number of people who’ve jumped on board, forgetting how we used to make fun of our mothers for wearing them in the 1990s.
There are also trends in literature. In 2018, Vanity Fair published an essay by Kenzie Bryant called “How Publishing’s Floral-Print Trend Came to Rule the World’s Bookshelves” about the overwhelming number of titles that included an Instagram-worthy cover. “The root of the trend is probably Fates and Furies,” wrote Bryant, “which Lauren Groff published with Penguin in 2015, though the art isn’t floral.”
It’s hilarious, really, that one successful book makes all publishers think — ooh, let’s do a cover like Lauren Groff’s, then we will get the same results.
Other trends in literature I’m noticing? (I have no research to back this up, only my own reading…)
First-person unreliable narrators (i.e., Girl on a Train, Gone Girl, Never Let Me Go, essentially all the books with Girl in the title.)
Present tense (See: The Invisible Life of Adie Larue, The Immortalists)
Time Travel (See: Cloud Cuckoo Land, Sea of Tranquility, One Italian Summer)
Women in STEM (See: Lessons in Chemistry)
There’s nothing wrong with following a trend. But there’s also an inherent risk to only following the crowd. If I only follow trends, then one day, I’m going to wake up with a Bronco in my driveway, a shelf full of “bouquet-books”, and three pairs of $500 purposefully-distressed sneakers with silver stars on the sides. If I only follow trends, then I don’t have to know what I like. If I only follow trends, I don’t have to know who I am. I don’t have to have an opinion.
My uncle’s two-car garage hasn't stopped him from accumulating vehicles — Cadillacs, mostly. El Dorados and Escalades. My brother-in-law Eric loves Land Rover Defenders. While stationed in England with the Army, he purchased not one, but two Defenders, and with a little effort and elbow grease, managed to get them both running. He sold one and brought the other back to the States. There’s no air conditioning, and it smells like diesel, but riding in it, you can’t help but notice other drivers turning to stare.
My history with cars is far less interesting. When I was sixteen, my parents announced we were moving from New York to South Carolina. As a bribe, they promised to buy me a car. I knew I didn’t really have a choice in the move, so I accepted their offer and started paying attention to cars. The coolest girl in my high school drove an electric blue two-door sedan. My older sister Leigh drove mint green Ford Taurus we called “Doris.” My other sister drove a gray Camry and had one of those tapes with a wire connected to her iPod so she could play Tory Amos through the speakers. The parking lot at my new high school in South Carolina held several massive trucks with oversized wheels. (“Isn’t that illegal?” I asked my new friends. They laughed at me.)
Then one day, I noticed a sleek silver four-door sedan parked on a side street. When I got home, I told my mother I was ready to cash in on the bribe. When she asked what kind of car I wanted, I grabbed a scrap piece of paper and drew a circle with three lines radiating out from the center. “I don’t know,” I said. “It had an emblem that looked like this.”
“Oh,” she laughed. “That’s a Mercedes. You’re not getting a Mercedes.”
In the end, my parents took me to a car lot and pointed to two used cars they’d pre-selected: a white Nissan Saturn and a red Ford Focus. I chose the Focus, and drove it all through college and into my early adulthood. I cried in that car in the Two Rivers Middle School parking lot almost every day for two years while I completed Teach for America. Eventually, the air conditioning gave out. It was not a great car. But it was mine.
As a writer — it is my job to create memorable characters. Novel characters become three-dimensional to a reader when they are defined by specific clear detail. In Marvelous Miss Masel, the eponymous main character carries around a dutch oven with brisket to the comedy clubs to try and secure a good time slot on stage. In A Man Called Ove, Ove loves Saabs and rages against new-fangled modernity. These details are what make a character rise from the page. They make the fictional characters real.
So why, in real life, am I so swayed by trends? Why do I want to wear what everyone else wears? Why do I want to buy what Instagram tells me to buy?
I have a theory.
As humans made in God’s image, we are designed to magnify and reflect (a.k.a. worship) God’s glory. Only, something has gone wrong in our hearts. Things got inverted, twisted. And so instead of being satisfied with admiring glory — our hearts want to possess it. We want to own it. When we see something beautiful, our first instinct isn’t to admire it from afar, but to try and commandeer it. To stamp our name to it. To stake our identity on it.
But just because something is beautiful doesn’t mean it has to be mine. Life is far more interesting — far more joyful — when we’re free to be individuals and pursue our own God-given dreams. (Particularly when those dreams have nothing to do with materialism, and more to do with serving our neighbors and communities.) We’re not here on earth to be the same. We are more beautiful the more we lean into our differences.
But let me be clear:
If you have a Bronco… this is me asking if I can take it for a ride.
As Wendell Berry puts it in his poem The Country of Marriage, “The forest is mostly dark, its ways to be made anew day after day, the dark richer than the light and more blessed, provided we stay brave enough to keep on going in.”
You received this email because at some point in the past, you expressed interest or signed up for email updates. I hope the words bring a bit of encouragement to keep entering into the (mostly) dark forest we call life.
Recent Favorites:
READ:
“When Culture Wars Go Way Too Far” by David French, for the Dispatch. Recently, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a piece of legislation that will essentially allow minors to travel to California to receive so-called “gender-affirming” medical care without parental consent. (This, in a state that still requires parental consent for piercings.) In his essay, David French breaks down the dominoes that will fall from this unprecedented legislation – breaking families apart.
LISTEN:
Maggie Rogers “Surrender”. I love new music, especially from artists to whom I’ve already pledged total and complete allegiance. Maggie Rogers won me over years ago when I saw the viral video of the moment she played her original song for Pharrell Williams during a student showcase at her art school. Patrick and I saw her play the Ryman in Nashville in late 2019 — her live performance is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Her debut album “Heard it In A Past Life” played in our house on repeat throughout the pandemic. Now, she’s back with a sophomore album — and while Surrender certainly won’t de-throne her first in my heart — it has plenty of incredible songs of its own.
One Last Thing…
As you can see, I have switched over to a new newsletter hosting platform, Substack. I am still learning the program, so please bear with me as I figure it out. But as always, if you find any joy in these musings, would you consider sharing with a friend? Finally, I love hearing from you. Don’t be shy! E-mail me! As always, I’ll do my best to respond.
With love,
Claire