With all the gloom and despondency shrouding America at present, what with a borderline civil war being played out on the streets between blacks and the police, and the electorate facing perhaps the most hair-tearingly dreadful Presidential candidates, it is reassuring to see evidence that the nation that brought Cheez Wizz and Scientology to the world hasn't lost its penchant for the spectacularly bizarre.
This week saw the grand opening of Ark Encounter, a Bible-themed park in Northern Kentucky. The centrepiece of this 800-acre attraction is a colossal replica Ark, built by Amish craftsmen to biblical dimensions, which is now the largest freestanding timber structure in the world.
This monumental act of hubris is the work of Australian multi-millionaire Ken Ham, the CEO of Answers in Genesis, a creationist group that asserts the literal truth of the Book of Genesis.
Accordingly, they believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that, to counter-claim Bill Hicks, humans co-existed with dinosaurs. (Although surely even they must think it a little odd that absolutely no scholars of the time saw dinosaurs as being worthy of even the slightest mention...?)
It is easy to be incensed and appalled at the idea that this is being fostered and promoted to American children as gospel truth, not to mention the fact that the park developers were gifted $18m in tax incentives from the state of Kentucky. Instead, it's best to applaud the blind ambition and wanton commitment to realise a Jean Baudrillard-esque simulacra of a myth.
In this age of grand confusion and schizophrenic certainties, it is somewhat comforting to see the persistence of some of the oldest myths in their most reductive and literal form.
Just as the flood of Gilgamesh may well have formed the basis for the Old Testament flood, in a future world blighted by devastating climate change and resource wars, this post-modern 21st century ark may well be discovered by AI-archaeologists and used to inform retrospective myths about our own ambitious, but ultimately very very strange, time.
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