ABSTRACT
Poet Allen Ginsberg is often credited with coining the phrase "Flower Power" in a 1965 essay published in the Berkeley Barb and titled "Demonstration or Spectacle as Example, As Communication, or How to Make a March/Spectacle". The promised force of Flower Power lies in its dramatization of "peace in action" or even how idleness is a form of waging peace. Ginsberg's vision for Flower Power encourages us to see a much more expansive overlap between drama and nonviolent action. Consider the thought experiment: Imagine the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream as "flower children". Ginsberg describes his mischievous peace protesters as a "corps of trained fairies". And the link between fairies and pacifism abides. In the epilogue to A Midsummer Night's Dream, the spritely Puck comes on stage to suggest that everything in the forest and the court was simply a dream, an "idle theme".
