“I Am Not Anti-Vaccination”: That Time I Became The Unwitting Posterboy For A Boneheaded Cause

Do you own your own face?

I was pretty sure I owned mine, but apparently I was mistaken. Apparently my face is floating free on the open market and is available for use by dumb people with dumb ideas.

Hey – I’m not saying I’ve got a perfect face, by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve just never considered it to be the kind of face that would promote irresponsible medical practices resulting in innocent children dying from preventable diseases.

I was alerted to this meme in April last year. That’s an old press shot of mine from around 2010, featuring my deathly pale skin, my unkempt blonde locks, and my classic Tom Ballard Quizzical Face™. Unfortunately, my image seems to have been clumsily grafted onto an odious piece of anti-vaccination propaganda in an effort to underline how the science of vaccinations is just so “mystifying”.

Of course, that’s bullshit: the science is pretty bloody solid. Truly, this is some Frankenstein-esque meme work.

Rage Against Vaccines never asked me if I’d support their cause, nor did they ask for permission to use my image. I felt used and gross and sick to the stomach; ironically, kind of like I needed a flu shot. My very nice agent got in touch with the group and demanded they take down the image immediately. They obliged and addressed the issue:

Apparently the shortlist for the best images to ridicule the claims of those who are pro-vaccinations was

1. Tom Ballard

2. A chimpanzee

Great. Now I’ve got a whole new set of body image issues to deal with.

I thought that was the end of that unpleasant chapter. Then, a few weeks ago, my little needle-fearing mug popped up again, this time on a different (but just as moronic, and since deleted) Facebook page:

That’s surely got to be case of the crack-pot pot calling the crack-pot kettle crack-pot black. (Also, I’d have thought any “educated person” would have known that using the image of a person with a public profile to suggest a tacit endorsement of an at best controversial (and at worst “batshit crazy”) political position is hella dodgy, but that’s just me.)

Those folks stopped using the meme after we asked them to, but who knows? Perhaps things on the internet never really die. Perhaps that meme will just continue to float on in the ether, occasionally appealing to the very sparsely-populated “pro-Tom Ballard/anti-vaccinations” demographic.

Perhaps I’m not the first person that this kind of thing has happened to.

I Am Not The First Person That This Kind Of Thing Has Happened To

I’m not naïve. I understand there are costs to being in the public eye: limited privacy, a greater level of scrutiny, some people wanting to use your profile to their own advantage – I get that. But as an “artist” (I know, I tell dick jokes for a living, but bear with me), my integrity is one of the few things I can hold on to in times of doubt. So when my likeness or my work is hijacked for an objectionable campaign – or when I see that kind of thing happening to other people – it makes me furious.

You might remember when former Palmer United senator Jacqui Lambie went a bit too far with the posty-posty last year, and fans of her Facebook page copped the below bastardisation of a photo by Canadian photojournalist Lana Slezic.

The original photograph – first stolen and appropriated by far-right UK party Britain First — is a powerful portrait of Afghanistan’s first policewoman, Malalai Kakar, who was shot and killed by the Taliban in 2008. It’s pretty big leap to use a stolen and uncredited image of Kakar – who Slezic had hoped to honour by her photography — to support Lambie’s call for the burqa to be banned and for all those who believe in Sharia law to “get out” of Australia.

Understandably, Slezic was fuming. “Everything she [Kakar] stood for…has been desecrated by how Jacqui Lambie…used this photograph,” she said. “I’m outraged actually [that] they would steal a photograph without any sort of consent, completely misrepresent it [and] use it for their own political agendas.”

Then there’s the case of Melbourne director Rick Mereki. Mereki made the below short film, Move, by shooting actor Andrew Lees as he walked through eleven different countries, over 44 days. The impressive piece was used  in an STA Travel campaign back in 2011.

Mereki and Lees were less than impressed to see their work get a sweet cameo in a promo video Marlboro put together, intended for internal use, to help develop a campaign that would encourage younger people to start smoking again. They found out about it after John Oliver ripped apart the tobacco industry on Last Week Tonight, in a segment which went viral earlier this year.

“The original campaign was one with such a positive message that to then have that repurposed like this, without consent, for a product that causes so much death and disease, is abhorrent,” Lees told Junkee. “It’s very distressing, to say the least, to have had my image used by a company I would never support, morally or otherwise, in front of a viewership of millions.”

@LastWeekTonight After watching last nights show i learnt Marlboro illegally used part of my short film MOVE in that “Maybe” promo video ??

— Rick Mereki (@Rickmereki) February 16, 2015

This practice of theft – of taking something and smearing it with ideological shit without permission – is disturbingly common. Che Guevara’s legacy is hotly debated and his image has been reproduced in a million different ways, but I’m pretty sure we can all agree that the communist revolutionary wouldn’t have been stoked about Mercedes-Benz using his face to help sell their luxury cars. Even documentarian Michael Moore – champion of the underdog! – shocked Australian filmmaker George Gittoes by incorporating 17 excerpts from Gittoes’ doco Soundtrack To War into Farenheit 9/11, with almost no notice at all.

“Michael got access to my stuff and assumed that I would be happy for it to be in 9/11,” said Gittoes at the time. “I would actually have been quite happy for it not to be in 9/11.”

Come on, Michael. When you assume… you steal other people’s shit and come across like a real wanker.

Even people’s words can be twisted  for scurrilous purposes – which is especially dangerous in the age of the internet, when unverified quotes and captions can be tweeted, shared and meme’d within a moment. Donald Horne, the originator of the phrase “the Lucky Country” in his 1964 book of the same name, has spoken out about the “long misuse of the phrase”, angered by how ’Strayans have taken to the term as a matter of pride, when in fact it was originally intended as a warning and a diss.

“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck,” reads the paragraph in question. “It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise…According to the rules Australia has not deserved its good fortune.”

Now, whenever I hear a politician or a Q&A panellist earnestly describe us as “The Lucky Country” and imply that’s a good thing, I imagine the ghost of Horne heckling from the back of the room: “READ OUT THE FULL QUOTE, YOU ARSEHOLE!!!”

There’s “Stealing”, And Then There’s Stealing 

I don’t know what the solution is here or anything – I’m just a guy with a face who doesn’t want kids to die from measles. The internet has completely transformed our definition of 00 and level of concern for — copyright issues, so maybe all this kind of stuff is to be expected. And I’m guilty of it too: I use music in my podcast without credit, and I’ve used memes and gifs and photos from a bunch of different sources for things online without appropriate shout-outs.

But when there’s a political element involved – or when someone’s abducting art or ideas without permission to achieve their own cruel ends — it feels profoundly more indecent to me. Particularly if you’re a litigious multi-national company that’s worth billions of dollars and trades in death and disease like Marlboro, or an insidious anti-science group that threatens public health like the anti-vax movement.

If that is you, then hey – this one’s on me:

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TOM BALLARD IS TOURING

Melbourne: Thursday March 26 – Sunday April 19 @ The Swiss Club — tickets here

Sydney: Thursday April 30 & Friday May 1 @ The Comedy Store — tickets here

Perth: Wednesday May 13 – Saturday May 16 @ Mount Lawley Bowling Club — tickets here

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Tom Ballard is a comedian, broadcaster, writer, actor and philanthropist/philanderer. He tweets @tomcballard and hosts his own podcast, Like I’m A Six-Year-Old.