Flashback: Premiere Cheescake's ”bake-at-home and save lives” gaslighting operation

Blazing Reader,

The novella I'm working on now, COVID Disobedience is partly set in Moosehead, Ontario, March 2020 — a week after Premier Doug "Cheesecake" Ford declared the first lockdown. Set a few months before my full-length novel, Much Ado About Corona, this shorter work brings back the novel's most popular character, Stefanie Müller. It's been nostalgic revisiting both her dissident character and that first chilling week of COVID mandates:

Here's an excerpt from chapter two:

Her eyes looked over at a Moosehead wall calendar held to the fridge door with a magnet. It was a gift Sandy Henderson had given her back in December, to welcome Stefanie and her bakery to Moosehead. March featured a photo of the iron “Moosehead” bust in front of town hall. On the page hanging below the photo were the days of the month, with 17 circled in red — the day when the province declared a provincial emergency under section 7.0.1 (1) of Ontario’s Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act.

“We are facing an unprecedented time in our history,” the plump Premier had said.

That was during the same press conference where he advised people to do more baking at home — even admitting that he’d already eaten “one too many cheesecakes — that’s my problem.”

Stefanie remembered how anxious he looked, informing Ontario’s 14 million citizens that they were now prisoners of the state. Maybe he was genuinely scared they wouldn’t buy into his ”bake-at-home and save lives” gaslighting operation.

Well, Premier Cheesecake, Stefanie thought to herself, you have nothing to fear.

Not only did people cheer on fourteen days of house arrest, but they were also asking for more. After all, what a comfy crisis: Stay at home, watch Netflix, eat cheesecake… and save the world.

Save the world. Sheesh...

As retired Constable Vincent Gircys (Ontario Provincial Police) said after reading my first novel, “History will be written to falsely show how our government ‘saved’ us from extinction. Much Ado About Corona slowly brings forward the invisible truth. The novel flows well, has an original story, maintained my attention and has an unexpected good ending.”

John C.A. Manley

PS And for more about my forthcoming novella, check out this post: One brave baker, a "14-day" lockdown and the ghost of Henry David Thoreau

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.