In his 2003 film, Anything Else, Woody Allen's school-teacher character states, “I try to give them some culture, every now and then, so they don't beat each other to death with bicycle chains”. Now I'm a great admirer of Mr. Allen's work, so much so that I can overlook his slur towards bike components... But with the Project for the New American Century in the White House, lately I, like many, find myself more concerned for the health of our own culture. The sculptures below look at various familiar cultural institutions and how they’ve readily become corrupt political instruments. Such social icons are often transformed overnight into tools of mass social control, used to misinform and redirect public opinion, while exploiting and promoting the private agendas of those in power. I have used the internal combustion engine as the common visual metaphor for these civil abuses because, in our celebrated democracy, we’ve come to realize that our collective voices are drowned out by the din of environmentally unfriendly engines at work, making frightful progress.