Writing vs Copywriting - Hicks Style

I've been looking online at a few sites like Elance lately to scan the freelance writing gigs available on there. Many writers say that because of the competition, you must be prepared to write for many different forms, including copywriting.  Indeed, people make VERY good money copywriting.  Advertising has always suckled writers, a creative avenue for them to earn a living moving words around so that they can be well-fed enough to be able to work on their novels.  Many writers do this.  It is completely and utterly acceptable to do this.  And yet, for me, looking at these sorts of writing jobs on Elance and thinking about doing this sort of work feels rather like attaching a giant vacuum cleaner to the bottom of my feet and letting it suck my eyeballs out through my soles.

So I guess copywriting isn't really the bag for me, right?  But idealism is a high-priced commodity these days when we're all for sale.  Sometimes I think that one day not so soon we will begin to feel bereft whenever we read anything that is not trying to sell us something because we've become so conditioned.  Sometimes, I can feel myself beginning to dwindle, looking at the shrunken writing market and the giant mass of people who wish to compete in it, and my low self-confidence blobs me forward an infinitesmal nanostep towards the landslide that will tip me down into one day thinking, "Well, come on.  Why not write copy for Lockheed Martin?  They're just providing a service like everybody else."

But I really don't think so.  Because, folks, when it comes to black and white thinking about this stuff, my view is a little Bill Hicksian: 

I wonder what Bill would have thought of the developments in the world today 20 years on if he had survived the cancer that felled him in the mid-90's.  I watched a documentary about him the other day, and followed it up last night watching one of his routines.  He was high-octane, passionate, visionary, a little scary ... and bloody brilliant :)

Oh, to live in a world that is not fuelled by marketeers.  They do not understand highest common denominators.  Beauty.  Rhythm.  The natural world.  Those are what will keep us from drowning in our own plastic.