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The Orlando Indicator 70
The Orlando INDICATOR
excerpts from the 70th edition, summer 1988
in this issue: "HITS"
a replay of our most popular articles
from the early 1980's
---
The Orlando Indicator
(the official newspaper of the Great Conspiracy)
June, 1982 edition
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This
explains why God is doing such a lousy job.
SECRET SERVICE VISITS INDICATOR
May 17 - I was minding my own business, as a matter of fact I
was sleeping, when there came a knock at the door of my
miserable little apartment. I fell off my bunk, crawled to the
door and yelled, "Who Goes There?" "Secret Service," came the
reply. "Secret Service?" I echoed. "Yes." I thought this was one
of my biker buddies playing a deranged joke, but when I opened
the door, there was a dude wearing a Suit and Tie. The real
thing. "Are you R K Harrison?" "Yes," I confessed. "I need to
have a talk with you." I invited him in, told him to have the
seat and looked at his identification. He asked me if I was the
editor of the Indicator, and again I confessed. I didn't want to
confess, but he was torturing me. (Sleep deprivation is a
well-known torture technique.) The SS man produced a copy of the
April Indicator and read aloud some of my anti-Reagan comments.
He said such swill is protected by the First Amendment, but he
expressed concern that my writing will become more and more
vitriolic until it reaches the point of illegally threatening
people. I tried to convince him that I'm not an assassin, but I
don't think he believed me. He asked, "Have you ever been busted
for anything?" "No," I said cheerfully. My clean police record
annoys a lot of my persecutors. The SS man told me, "You don't
want to do anything to bring yourself to the attention of the
police, who might not have such a liberal attitude, because they
can give you a real hard time if they want to. You know, they
can nickel-and-dime you to death." Noticing a reference to the
Hell's Angels in the Indicator, and the FTW sticker on my door,
he said, "I see you have a little Fuck the World emblem here.
When I was a cop, we used to chase the Hell's Angels all over
the state. Are you a rider? I didn't see any big machine
outside." I laughed, because this was ridiculous. "I'm not a
biker trainee, if that's what you're asking. That's my big
ten-speed parked in the driveway." The SS man apologized for
waking me up and then departed. I wondered what he was really up
to, and I'm sure he wondered the same about me. Later, a friend
of mine told me he'd been questioned by the SS after leading an
anti-Reagan rally. Evidently the Secret Service routinely tried
to intimidate Reagan's opponents. However, we are not afraid,
because Good always triumphs over Evil (sooner or later).
---
WORK
from a 1984 edition
DEARBORN, Mich. - The noise, monotony and pressure of the
assembly line is a natural breeding ground for headaches, but
workers say the recent recession brought with it a new source
of pain - bosses who tell them to "be thankful you have a
job." -newspaper clipping
For starters, nothing is more social than the endless work - pay
- rest - work cycle which the vast majority of us are forced to engage
in. Our very need to earn money to buy necessities, the boring,
demeaning, treadmill nature of most jobs, the spiritual poverty of
shopping, the channelling of pleasure impulses into conspicuous
consumption or into organized leisure which we pay for (movies,
ballgames) - all these are features of a particular social system. Not
only is this system not eternal, it ha en been around very long. Just
another signpost in history. -The Daily Battle
I no longer doubt that every ideal and institution in the United
States is subordinated to the right of a small minority among us
to make profits. The resulting desecration of our values and
lives (is) only more blatant and undeniable in our workplaces.
The undeniable and generally accepted truth about work in the
United States today is that, on the whole, it is extremely
confining, dehumanized, and meaningless for those who perform
it. To explain this, some say work is a necessary evil. Others
say, no work in our system is more inhumane than it needs to be;
therefore we can and should carry out reforms to make work more
satisfying. Taken together, these prevailing views mean th at
the quality of work... at best can only be improved somewhat and
wit system. Their common, silent message is that no other form
of social organization can offer hope of radical improvement in
work. With these nearly unchallenged views I strongly disagree.
I support meaningful reform, but I do not believe the work
process can be radically improved through reforms within the
American system. -Richard Pfeffer
People are beginning to doubt the dogma that superseding work
means living in caves and eating small furry insects. Most work serves
the predatory purposes of commerce and coercion and can be abolished
outright. The rest can be automated away and/or transformed into
creative, play-like pastimes whose variety and conviviality will make
extrinsic inducements like the capitalist carrot and the "Communist"
stick equally obsolete. In the impending meta-industrial revolution,
libertarian communists revolt inst work will settle accounts with
"Libertarians" and "Communists" working against revolt. And then we can
go for the gusto! -Bob Black
Who is the spray-can artiste who has been writing "Work stinks"
on walls all over Orlando? Methinks it is the same malcontent
who sprays all those circle-A anarchy symbols. Whoever he is,
he has a genius slogan. Graffitist, identify yourself so we
can join your Work Stinks movement. -a columnist in The
Orlando Sentinel
"Because they know Monday morning is coming, workers say they
become tense 12 hours before they have to be on the job," the
researcher said. "Sunday evening should be a time to relax,
and we recommend they try to find other things to think about
so they aren't dreading a return to work before it actually
happens." -newspaper clipping
--- Editorial columnist Charley Reese published the following article in
The Orlando Sentinel on March 15, 1985.
DEAR ORLANDO ANARCHISTS: PEOPLE EITHER WORK OR ARE PARASITES
There are people in the area - a small group - who call
themselves the Orlando Anarchists. Among other things, they are
against work. I have felt that way myself at times. But unlike
an anarchist, I know reality when I see it. These folks seem to
think that work is a curse put on mankind by the capitalistic
system and that if the system were destroyed, people would be
free, in the words of one of their pamphlets, to be "fully human
- generous, playful, spontaneous, venturesome and
unpredictable." The mind boggles at the depth of ignorance
necessary to sustain that belief. ...People must work, not
because of the dictates of any political or economic system, but
to survive. Every day the human body requires water and food. In
most climates, people require shelter of some sort. And mankind,
being a weakling by animal standards, also requires tools. There
is absolutely no way that food, potable water, shelter and tools
can be obtained without work. If you do not do the work, then
someone else must and make you a gift of a portion of their
labor. In this universe, you are either a worker or a parasite
living off other workers. This is the true, natural state of man
- to work - as ordained by biology, not by Adam Smith or Karl
Marx. There are a number of ways that labor can be divided and
organized, but there are no ways to dispense with labor. No
work, no eat; no eat, no live is a scientific statement, not a
moral rule... Urban life seems to have fostered in some people
an ignorance more profound than any found in the outback, the
bush or the boondocks. It is ignorance of how wealth is created.
Hamburger does not appear in the supermarket by magic. It begins
with a cow and somebody who labors to feed, shelter and doctor
it. Then the cow is moved to the slaughterhouse where someone
else must slay it, skin it, butcher it, refrigerate it and
transport it. There is a long chain of hard, dirty work l eading
up to the humbl rger patty we so casually chew on while musing
over the latest political nonsense. Our local anarchists aren't
rebelling against capitalism; they are rebelling against life
and reality. They are looking for the Garden of Eden. They think
it is concealed behind the facade of modern society. They think
the garden will reappear if they destroy society. They are
doomed by their illusion to waste their lives in frustration.
There is no Garden of Eden this side of the grave, nor can one
be created. For as long as people exist on this planet, they
will spend the bulk of their lives at hard labor.
This reply ran in the Sentinel's letters column a few days later:
Inadequate analysis
When Charley Reese wrote a column attacking the anarchists'
anti-work literature, he chose a processed and nutritionally
worthless product - hamburger - as an example of food
production. He didn't mention that anyone can grow vegetables,
and there are easy, organic ways of keeping bugs from eating the
crops. Apologists for the status quo rely heavily on the myth
that there is "a long chain of hard, dirty work" involved in
producing necessities. Work that produces useless or hazardous
products such as Rolls-Royces and chemical insecticides need not
be done at all. The labor that is necessary should be made into
a playful part of everyday life. Gardening, weaving and
carpentry could be enjoyable hobbies instead of daily drudgery.
I think Reese failed to give an adequate analysis of our view of
a decentralized, non-profit world. Rick Harrison ORLANDO
Bob Black sent the following rebuttal to the Orlando Sentinel and the
Orlando Indicator; the Sentinel declined to print it.
To the editor: If columnist Charley Reese isnt careful he just
might enlarge that "small group" the Orlando Anarchists into a
big one with his transparently specious arguments that work is
inevitable. I have noticed that nobody believes in work as
fervently as those who don't have to do any. He who intones
"there is no free lunch" usually has an expense account. Reese
says that anybody who doesn't work is a parasite, but the real
parasites are the hordes of bureaucrats, politicians, bankers,
priests, soldiers, lawyers, and columnists whose mouths outrun
their minds. Reese, who has never done so, asserts that anyone
going off into the wilderness to live off the land would "find
himself doing the most dreadful drudge work under the harshest
of disciplinarians: hunger and thirst." But the question is how
co-operating groups (not solitary individuals) might live, and
here the anthropological evidence which Reese ignores is quite
clear. As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins demonstrated in his
book "Stone Age Economics," contemporary hunter-gathere rs -
despite having b ced into the most inhospitable environments on
the planet by the expansion of state and market systems - "work"
only about four hours a day, in healthy open-air surroundings,
with no bosses, time-clocks and production quotas, and produce
abundantly for their needs. They make no distinction between
work and play because for them there is none, and indeed their
"work" - hunting, fishing, gardening - is what _we_ do to relax
and forget about work! Since only 4 percent of Americans produce
far more than enough food for all the rest, it is obvious that
most work serves other than useful purposes. In fact, what it
does is sustain parasitic governmental and business elites and
habituate the masses to hierarchy, obedience and deferred (that
is, denied) gratification. No one can say for sure that work can
be eliminated, that is, if its small useful core can be
transformed into a variety of diverse, creative activities which
would by their intrinsic enjoyment attract enough people to
produce as much as is truly needed or desired. But there are
reasons to think it might be done, and columnists might apply
themselves to this constructive task rather than re-hash
platitudes. Does Reese know what kind of company he's keeping
when he dogmatizes "no work, no eat"? Almost exactly the same
expression appears in the Soviet Constitution. All authorities
and authoritarians, East and West, religious and secular, left
and right agree on this axiom, and this is why the real movement
toward real freedom is ignored, opposed or oppressed by all of
them. I will leave off by issuing a challenge to Charley Reese.
I've been hard on him because he arrogantly insults a group of
his neighbors whose ideas he doesn't even try to understand. But
I will take it all back if he will publish a confession that he
writes for the Sentinel solely "to survive" as he passes "the
bulk of (his) life at hard labor"; that he just churns out copy
to earn his paycheck. Why should anyone take seriously a guy who
writes for such a reason? I too write a column, for a small San
Francisco newspaper called Open City, and I don't get paid; and
yet it's one of my most fulfilling activities. Why shouldn't
everyone be able to live this way? -Bob Black
***
NOTE: The Orlando Indicator first appeared in late 1976 and
eventually became one of many obscure radical publications with a
thinly-scattered readership across the continent. Some of the
Indicator's observations seem worth preserving, so Tangerine Network has
made them available in this electronic format. The Indicator was edited
by R. K. "Rick" Harrison and ceased publication in July of 1988. The
70th and final edition, presented here, was a compilation of significant
articles from the Indicator's ul career. The hardcopy version contains
three more articles and a cover collage and is still available (as of
early 1989) for $2 (cash or unused postage stamps) from Tangerine
Network, Box 547014, Orlando FL 32854. This material is in the public
domain and should be given freely to anyone who might benefit from it.
[EOF]
