Here is how to build a popular ideology:

Do rock-solid factual investigation. Satisfy the requirements of the critical mind.

Present the facts of the investigation in compelling stories that win over the heart, too. Adhere to the facts.

Encourage the heart and the mind to believe together for once. And what a relief wholehearted belief is in these fragmentary contradictory times. This rare peace is reason enough to believe.

Build fact and feeling together, higher and higher, to moral heights where gravity weakens and earth loosens its grip. Up here ideas are lighter and can be piled one upon the other with only sporadic logical spot welding.

The heart has the mind’s endorsement now, the newly unified soul hangs on your verdict.

Now is poetry’s moment. Passionate declarations, inspired insinuations, elegant analogies, and flights of spirit move mountains arguments cannot even touch.

Set your conclusion at the tip of the crescendo.

Then drop to earth again. Plant your feet where all can see where they are rooted. Return to facts. Build a second edifice like the first and crown it with the same conclusion. Then drop.

Repeat a third time, then a fourth.

Spread your conclusive points over the breadth of the sky. Now it is a worldview, supported on columns of excellent journalism. Readers will rise with you to hold it up, united in heart and mind, with themselves, with each other, as a community, as a collective mind, as a political body ready to act on behalf of your faith.

Nobody will notice the heavenly roof is suspended by nothing but  a desire for sheltering unity. Nobody can believe the sky is not attached to the ground.

The columns of fact and argument bear no load.  They are decorative stumps. They are monuments to the idea of reason.

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If you teach your poetry ventriloquism, when you let the facts speak for themselves they say what your heart wants to hear. This is doubly true if you think a complete knowledge of facts points to a single moral conclusion.

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The formula: Journalism; poetic ethical interlude; journalism; poetic ethical interlude…