anita roddick, founder of “the body shop”, who built her fortune on mass-marketing ethically produced non-animal-tested products, just sold her chain to corporate cosmetics giant l’oreal.

Ms Roddick said she had an issue with L’Oréal over animal testing but that the firm had “a great statement about what they’re doing on animal testing or what they are trying to do”. She said the assumption that L’Oréal was the “enemy” was “quite wrong”.

are people’s values and beliefs so flexible these days that they’re always susceptible to any amount of monetary wooing? are we still surprised? should we be?

selling out has become so endemic, it hardly seems remarkable any more. we live in a world where anything is for sale – even more so if it can be used to sell something else. long gone is the furor over iconic songs being used to sell expensive athletic shoes, and african supermodels endorsing ethically dirty diamond companies which pillage the land and abuse workers hardly gets a newspaper mention. these days, janis joplin sings a “piece of her heart” for cadbury’s. Ozzy osbourne, the self-titled “prince of darkness” associated with satanism, endorses a butter substitute. The great Pablo Picasso’s inimitable signature is emblazoned on the back of a line of Citroen cars. Is all cultural cachet really just up for sale to the highest bidder?

Pete Townshend of “the who” (who did an ad for the air force at the height of the vietnam war) has said, “These songs are my property. They came out of my head. I have every right to do whatever I want with them. You own your personal reactions to them and whatever memories they evoke for you, but the songs are entirely mine and I will use them any way I like.” And that’s pretty hard to argue against. As this article so adeptly points out:

“Pop by its democratic nature has destroyed barriers and prejudices (good), yet by its capitalistic nature has always been available for cooptation by the power elites (bad)… Nor is this merely a measure of how debased things have become, of how low we’ve sunk since pop’s glory days — whenever you think those were. In any kind of historical perspective, the contradictions of pop culture have always obtained as they obtain now. Pop was never pure, damn it.”

And perhaps that true of all manner of cultural media today – by very nature of its accessibility, it is ripe for overuse/misuse/mixed use. But it’s not just pop songs or icons anymore. And when blatant greed outweighs moral fibre, or loyalty to one’s beliefs, it’s hard to fathom the depths to which society has sunk in pursuit of the almighty dollar. art, music, film all plundered by congomerates with no sense of sanctity or cultural reverence. and stars, writers, singers all eager to prostrate themselves at the temple of crass commercialism.

I don’t know why i still expect any semblance of moral rectitude – nothing is sacred and no one is immune. it just strikes me as a sad commentary on today’s society that the threshold for cashing in seems to get lower with every passing day.

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selling out, the body shop, anita roddick