Margaret Atwood takes up shelves in bookstores, to the extent actual bookstores still exist, because her writing and thinking captured a generation of serious thought. Not that it helped her from being reduced to a cardboard cutout when someone unworthy decided to debate her bad feminism.

Not quite the Thrilla in Manila, but then, Atwood’s image on the poster belied the fact that she wouldn’t be there. This was Julie Rak, whoever she is, fighting a caricature. 

And yet, this being the bizarro world of 2018, Atwood’s role in Rak’s University of Alberta event wasn’t as a feminist heroine. In fact, Atwood wasn’t even in attendance. The above-described poster was just a gimmick to promote Rak’s caricature of Atwood as the Trotsky of Canadian feminism. And the fact that Rak feels comfortable signaling this posture on publicly displayed posters shows she isn’t some outlier loon. Just the opposite: In recent years, the ideological mobbing of Atwood and other well-established writers has become a mass-participation phenomenon among young Canadian literati who mobilize daily on social media.

So why would any putatively serious person seek to promote herself so shamelessly? What’s in it for Rak? The same thing that’s in it for the multitude of insignificant writers, puny thinkers, who would try to knock someone who has proven her intellectual worth off her pedestal.

“That’s because the students don’t get honest feedback. University life is now customer-focused. Hurting a person’s feelings—by telling them they’re not a good writer—now can be characterized as a form of harassment. If a prof were to tell a student, ‘This was a terrible story and you wasted the class’ time by discussing it,’ you might be doing the student a favour [in the long run]. They could do something else in life. But today’s instructors would never dream of doing that. So you tell everyone they’re great, and give them a few substantive things to work on in a supportive way, and you collect your paycheque and go home.”

The result is that an entire generation of fiction writers has come through creative-writing programs thinking that they’re skilled auteurs with important, luminous stories to tell the planet—especially in the case of female, immigrant or Indigenous writers, who constantly are being bombarded with well-practiced aphorisms about the special moral urgency of their message. When they graduate, and there’s no market for their work, these writers naturally conclude that dark forces are at work: “They feel ripped off, or they blame it on racism or sexism or something. Bitter writers are nothing new, of course. This bitterness was a thing before the first quill was dipped into ink. But now they have an outlet for the bitterness online. And they somehow have this weird idea that if they get some famous author ‘canceled’ by shaming him [on Twitter], then that author’s spot [on bookshelves] will open up in the market for their own book. But of course, it doesn’t work that way.”

Is this a CanLit problem? Hardly. When I recently had coffee with Alan Gura, one of the things we talked about was being subject to constant attack on social media by law students and baby lawyers, people who had neither experience nor accomplishments to their name, telling a guy who had twice prevailed in paradigm-shifting cases before the United States Supreme Court that he’s wrong, stupid or evil.

These are disembodied voices on social media, usually surrounded by a small coterie of similarly undistinguished sycophants who echo their approval, calling a lawyer with established credibility, with formidable legal skills, with an undeniable intellect, that he’s awful, as if they had the chops to carry his briefcase, no less challenge him.

Are these back-benchers not “entitled” to their views? They’re allowed to believe them and voice them, their wholesale lack of humility notwithstanding. But Rak’s not Atwood. They’re not Gura. And should they succeed in taking down someone who matters, they will not take their place because they are unworthy.Throwing pebbles is easy. Achievement is hard. Being a victim is not an achievement, no matter who in your echo chamber feels your pain.