Ahhhhh, what a liberating feeling. My first column for malaysiakini . A merciful release, for a few hours, at least, from writing for and about advertising.

A field of literature, or perhaps more accurately illiterature, to which I've devoted most of my time for so long I feel I've been doing it ad nauseam . Which happens to be the title of my forthcoming book-length collection of 80 or so of the columns I've written over the years for the Malaysia-based marketing and ad mag, ADOI .

You should ignore the foregoing sentence, of course. It's a deliberate if relatively venial example of venal journalism. A small specimen of the cancer of commercialisation that's metastasizing everywhere in most of the world's media.

An instance of the increasing invasion of what purports to be editorial by 'spin' and unacknowledged advertorial ranging in scale from the kind of minor-league self-interest and cronyism of which I've provided an instance above, to massively-paid pluggery of everything from celebrities, sports, products and services to political parties and pressure groups, all posing as honest-to-goodness news or opinion.

Not that there's anything wrong with advertising or promotion per se . As long as mass-salesmanship is identified as such, and not misrepresented as news or genuinely-held views, it's a legitimate and even essential component of most of the world's economic and political systems, and also sustains the very media that carry it.

So, as intrusive and irritating as I find it at times from my point of view as a consumer, I'm very pro-advertising indeed in its overt, identifiable manifestations, and by no means regretful of my career-long and continuing involvement in it.

In fact I owe it a great deal. It has fed my family, paid my bills or most of them, and provided me with lots of great friends, including my current wife. It's also been a golden opportunity to discover, develop and enjoy employing whatever creative talents I have.

In fact, the more I think about the advertising business as I write this, the more clearly I realise that the principal reason I find it so sickening at times as to call my book about it (product plug alert!) Ad Nauseam , is what a pain clueless clients can be.

Reasons to write

But as I celebrate my freedom to write this column, I'm suddenly reminded of the stern lesson that previous forays into journalism have taught me: that rejection of concepts or copy by the odd advertising client is nothing compared with the pitfalls and terrors facing a journalist. The pen may very well be mightier than the sword, but it's no match for the scalpel-sharp pencil of a gimlet-eyed editor.

And if your copy survives that onslaught relatively unscathed, it then gets to run the gauntlet of the readers, many of them not only brighter than any writer, but also better-informed, and with seemingly boundless capacity for responding with cutting remarks.

But as you see, I'm taking another stab at it anyway. For lots of reasons, some of which other writers have expressed more cleverly or concisely than I'm capable of. English novelist Rebecca West, for example, said "I write in order to discover what I think."

Me too, as I find that composing and arranging my thoughts for discriminating and critical readers, as the illustrious Dr Johnson famously remarked of a felon's feelings at the prospect of being hanged next morning, "wonderfully concentrates the mind".

On a lighter note, but another one that I personally relate to very closely, as I love to both use and misuse language, is a quote from SJ Perelman, the American humorist who wrote the scripts for many of the Marx Brothers movies, and who explained his urge to write by declaring that "I revel in the prospect of being able to torture a phrase once more".

Some of us writers try exercising and exorcising our angst by torturing, not just words and phrases, but ourselves as well. So I'm also in sympathy with novelist and screenwriter Graham Greene in his opinion: "Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic and fear which are inherent in the human situation."

Of all the reasons for writing that I've read, however, perhaps the one I most admire, though I fear I'll never have the guts, let alone the grandeur, to emulate, is that of Emile Zola: "If you ask me why I came into this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud." And live out loud he did.

He not only created a tremendous reputation as a 'realistic' novelist and in the process suffered considerable and undeserved condemnation as a pornographer for his scathing portrayals of social evils then prevalent in Paris. He then risked everything he had worked for in his heroic and ultimately successful efforts to achieve justice in the so-called 'Dreyfus Affair', in which the French government of the day tried to pin a high-level official scandal on an innocent junior army officer.

Perhaps the closest I'll ever get to Zola's magnificent motivation for writing is the lower-grade but nonetheless genuine urge powerfully stated by William Gass: "I write because I hate. A lot. Hard."

Right to speak

I know nothing else about Gass or his work, but I share his sentiments entirely when it comes to writing about some of the things I loathe most. Like corruption, especially in high or privileged places; victimisation of the hapless and the helpless on every level from global to domestic; and people who fail in their duty to uncover and combat such evils, as the police, the judiciary and the so-called 'mainstream' press in Malaysia and so many other countries so evidently and systematically do.

I'm happy to concede there's at least one local hard-copy newspaper with enough courage or political independence to strive to make a difference. The Sun - may it and its crusading columnist Citizen Nades long continue to shine - doesn't yet entirely live-up to its slogan 'telling it as it is'.

But it is certainly demonstrating that in some ways it is free in more than just price. Witness the way it is exposing one piece of chicanery after another - first billboards, now pest control - by officers of MBPJ and a Menteri who seems to be getting a bit too Besar for his boots.

Besides the urge to write about and maybe help right wrongs, not just in my native Australia, but anywhere and everywhere in the world that evil and injustice are abroad, and all the other rationales I've quoted, there's one more and most crucial reason that I'm thankful to malaysiakini for giving me the opportunity to go on and on ad lib .

I want my daughter Sammie (considering our considerable age difference, I likely won't be here for as long as I dearly wish I could be) to know that I kept faith with the fact that she knows instinctively at 11 years of age and I hope she never forgets: the fact that we all have the right to voice the truth and speak our piece.

And that we owe it to ourselves and our fellows to follow the dictum of the great philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell: "Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced."

DEAN JOHNS is an Australian freelance journalist now living in Kuala Lumpur and a former occasional columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald .