Between Brownell and Grinnell
The first time I heard the postmodern mantra, “there is no ethical consumption under late capitalism,” was probably somewhere in Steiner Hall, sometime in the Fall of 2013. It was my first foray into the realm of academia via Grinnell College. Prior to my preliminary exposure to philosophy and literary theory, both the theoretical underpinnings and global workings of capital were far beyond my intellect. I was embarrassingly conservative in my understanding of political economy after four years of Catholic high school, so when I was first acquainted with this sloganized assessment of international capitalism, I interpreted it to mean, “all financial decisions are essentially neutral from a moral standpoint considering every transaction is in some form tainted by violence and oppression, so, I guess, do as you please with your money.” It wasn’t a very solid ethical grounding.
In actuality, that leftist catchphrase is a criticism of liberal forms of political activism like buying a bunch of Ethos water bottles at Starbucks or being a militant vegan, practices of consumption that do not equate to effective political mobilization. It’s an important ideological distinction, capitalist apathy versus material analysis, one that I was made aware of after a few semesters of thorough study. Despite being at the helm of the same institution that broadened my knowledge of political theory, it appears the administrators of my alma mater have decidedly aligned with mores similar to those of a reactionary and uneducated 18 year old boy.
While Grinnell, Iowa is mostly known for being a bucolic college town, it is also home to the death mogul Pete Brownell, CEO of the massive firearm accessory producer Brownells Inc., and president of the crypto-fascist NRA paramilitary. With rises in police violence and mass shootings, especially since the ascension of Trump, the otherwise diffident town of Grinnell has become a front line of the national gun control debate.
There is a rigid ideological demarcation between the liberal-left campus culture of Grinnell, an enclave of reformers, and the neighboring community of pro-Brownell conservatives, a local grouping that serves as a proxy for a larger national faction of aggrieved white petty bourgeois Republicans. While this duality would seem to necessarily lead towards insular conflict in the microcosm of Poweshiek County, the students and faculty of Grinnell College are not the major cohorts that determine how the college interacts with the town and its businesses. Fiscal policies and community relationships are primarily established by Grinnell College’s executive administrators, who are themselves directed by the interests of the college’s trustees. While the students and educators of the school may be on average left-leaning, the managers of Grinnell are, succinctly put, capitalists. Their rapport with Brownell is glaringly less caustic.
There is a significant friction that originates in the affray between the college’s market strategy of championing student social justice campaigns and their fondness for Brownell’s donations, funds that have been utilized to finance extra-curricular activities like Ignite, a laudable after school program that allows Grinnell College students to teach local children about various topics not conventionally broached in a standard public school lesson plan. A political quandary is posed. Can Brownell’s investment into Grinnell be justified considering the college advertises itself as an institution opposed to injustice and inequality?
President Raynard Kington, representing both himself and the centrism of Grinnell’s administration, has stressed that yes, Brownell’s fortune is regrettably acquired, but at least some of that cash is materially benefitting the school, right?
Recently, President Kington came out in defense of Grinnell’s monetary and civil relationship with the Brownell family, responding to a column written for the Scarlet and Black by ’68 alumnus Trip Kennedy who decried Brownell’s accord with the school. In an expectedly disagreeable letter to the student newspaper, Kington stressed that while he personally believes the NRA’s national political influence is a corruption of American democracy, “The proximity of such divergent political and social views in a town like Grinnell, while challenging, is fundamentally beneficial to our educational mission, as long as we can engage in civil conversations and refrain from dehumanizing those who do not agree with our own views.”
Kington’s statement is altogether confounding. On one hand he stresses that the NRA, and by affiliation the company Brownell owns, is a hazardous sociopolitical presence, but one that he also paradoxically believes is crucial for furthering a student’s academic development and building a more robust local community. In the current moment, that’s an audacious appraisal. Tacitly accepting the money of a political organization that has produced an environment in which mass gun violence has become a banalized condition of living, most assuredly, does not bolster learning or local improvement. Nevermind the hypothetical dehumanization of gun owners, what about those who have lost their humanity by being shot to death?
While the blatant hypocrisy of Kington’s letter is disconcerting, it’s not unanticipated. In order to more fully understand Grinnell College’s institutional contentedness with Brownell’s money, it’s necessary to review the apparatuses of political violence foundational to the American state.
In Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, “Critique of Violence,” he argues that “violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it (the law) not by the ends it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.” When one conceives “the law,” they must also necessarily contemplate the inextricable linkage of the state and its arms that devise, legitimate, and enforce said law. Grinnell College is a private business, and therefore, ideologically allied with the capitalist state. The NRA may seem like it is in a completely separate political universe when compared to the ostensibly lefty Grinnell, but in reality, the college is subject to the governing bodies that the NRA actively motivates and legally sways.
Mass shooters, if apprehended by police, are obviously charged as murderers who have committed a heinous act, but this is the average citizen’s perspective. It’s integral to recognize that the criminal expression, reckoned by the state that dictates the criminality, more so stems from the fact that the violence was not perpetrated by arbiters of the state.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’s 2015 investigation into police homicide records, “We found that over the study period from 2003 through 2009 and 2011, the ARD (arrest-related death) program captured, at best, 49% of all law enforcement homicides in the United States. The lower bound of ARD program coverage was estimated to be 36%. These findings indicate that the current ARD program methodology does not allow a census of all law enforcement homicides in the United States.” Additionally, based on findings gathered by the National Police Misconduct Report, out of 3,238 criminal police cases between 2009 and 2010, only 33% were convicted, and out of that those convictions, only 36% served sentences. Empirically speaking, gun violence is committed daily, largely by police, many of which never face any form of judgement. Shootings in America, at least in the gaze of the state, are only a social malady if they are being inflicted beyond its executive purview, without its legal permission.
The American judicial quo can be explained by Benjamin’s assertion that “All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving.” It is this quality that provides the underlying pardon of Brownell. In the past 28 years, the NRA has donated over 23 million dollars. Just over 19 million of that has gone to the Republicans. The National Rifle Association is a barely unofficial wing of the GOP, a steady influence on its legislative objectives, and a galvanizing force for the party’s voting blocs. As an organization, it has an undeniably prominent role in lawmaking and law-preserving, paramountly gun rights. Because of this internalization within the design of the state, the American cultural ill of rampant mass shootings the NRA has had a principal position in forming is exonerated, at least, enough to destigmatize Brownell’s gifts to Grinnell College. In the Grinnell admin’s eyes, the NRA isn’t a diabolical interest group that has essentially normalized mass death, they are a valid caucus of the GOP and have to be valued for contributing an alternative view of society.
Another leftist catchphrase, derived from Benjamin’s critique, can more concisely explain this relation of power: The state owns a monopoly of violence. Any exertion of force not condoned or carried out by the government and its various apparatuses is punishable. Since the NRA has been subsumed into the state’s machinery, violence that has flared out from the national consumerist gun culture it has fostered is repudiated with thoughts and prayers, but never spurned in the domain of policy. President Kington’s letter to the editor epitomizes this political reality.
I am not claiming that all mass shootings are categorically a manifestation of state violence, although, it could be argued that many of these killings are the ideological byproduct of an overarching culture of white supremacy. That’s another scrutiny. However, it is unarguable that the state, persuaded by the ideals of the NRA, tolerates these crimes and continually refuses to advance possible legislative solutions. The shooters may face the justice system, but the actual violence and its instruments remain excused from legal rectification despite mass public support for gun control, because that gun violence is a vital tool utilized by the state to reproduce itself.
The American government will continue to shrug off this public ailment, and the NRA will persist as a vigorous organization, as long as the bullets are being aimed at civilians, not threatening the authority of the state and its monopoly of power. I imagine if black communities across America started visibly and assertively exercising their 2nd amendment rights as the Black Panthers did in the 1960’s, Congress would more proactively approach gun control measures.
Returning back to Poweshiek County, when Raynard Kington affirms that Pete Brownell’s investments into the school are advantageous and respectable, he conveys the administration’s assent that the NRA is a lawful organization, a proper branch of the political structure that one can and should do cordial business with, not a contemptible fount of domestic terrorism that must be fiercely rejected.
Contrary to Kington’s belief, Pete Brownell is not merely an “engaged citizen” of the Grinnell community. He is the leading figure of an organization responsible for propagating the conditions that have resulted in the deaths of thousands, an organization that has faced almost zero repercussions due to their connections to the domineering power and uncontested violence of the American government. All enterprise under capital may be unethical, but that doesn’t mean academic officials who take pride in their college’s supposed commitments to social progress should welcome and defend blood money.
Citations:
http://english.columbia.edu/files/english/content/Critique_of_Violence.pdf
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ardpatr.pdf
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=d000000082&cycle=2014
