I visited Celebration, Florida last weekend to get a feel for how the housing and gas crises were affecting our American mythology.

The debate over what — if anything — the government should do about easing consumer pain over gas prices and overbuilding in the residential sector has dominated the 24 hour news cycle since the national average price for gas passed $4. Peter Goodman’s article “Rethinking the Country: Life as Energy Costs Rise” is a good example of two dominant strains of the debate.

On one hand, the perception that a technological crisis looms worries consumers who fear that they are in a technological trap. Goodman gives the case of Juanita Johnson and her husband as anecdotal informants. The Johnsons, “retired Denver schoolteachers, moved here [to the Denver ex-urbs] last August, after three decades in the city and a few years in the mountains. They bought a four-bedroom house for $415,000. Last winter, they spent $3,000 on propane for heat, she said. Suddenly, this seemed like a place to flee. ‘We’d sell if we could, but we’d lose our shirt,’ Ms. Johnson said. Recently she counted 15 sale signs. One home nearby is listed below $400,000. ‘I was so glad to get out of the city, the pollution the traffic, the crime,’ she said. Now, the suburbs seem mean. ‘I wouldn’t do this again.’”

On the other hand, Americans’ identity is deeply invested in the “Jeffersonian myth” that the United States is founded on a class of small, rural freeholders.

Though never exactly a reality, the myth grounds the political ideal of democracy defended by country farmers/gentlemen against political corruption, the corruption of wealth, and the evils of city life (as Vernon Parrington expressed it in 1941). This myth quietly informs thinking of Thomas Frank’s subjects in What’s the Matter with Kansas? and it is expressed most eloquently by Megan Werner in Goodman’s article: “Werner, 39, a mother of three, moved here five years ago from a dense suburb closer to Denver. She and her husband bought a home set on a 1.5-acre lot in the Deer Creek Farm subdivision. The space justified her husband’s 40-minute commute. ‘We wanted more than a postage stamp,’ she said, as her 5-year-old daughter walked barefoot across the driveway. It used to cost her about $30 to fill her Honda minivan with gas. Now, it is more like $50, and she coordinates her trips — shopping in town, combined with dance lessons for her children. But she has no thoughts of leaving. ‘I can open up my door and my kids can play,’ Ms. Werner said.”

Mrs. Werner, like folks who wanted to move to Celebration, USA when it was first organized, sought freedom through deeply American symbols of achievable prosperity: a stand-alone house, the freedom of movement given by an automobile for every adult in the household, and enough property to represent the green fields of agrarian labor, without tying the occupants to actual agriculture as their means of producing wealth. This attitude is reflected in much of the architecture of Celebration.

This house, in the Federal style, is a representative example of the ethos that Celebration seeks to achieve. The “town center” is built around a lake, which is meant to evoke the bays of towns like Beaufort, South Carolina or Norfolk, Virginia (though santized of any hint of commercial maritime uses).

These are powerful symbols in the popular American imagination. Next time I’ll look at some more details of Celebration and its environs.