Life in Geezerville revolves around little things—habits, schedules, expectations. Growing old, in case you haven’t heard, is difficult and full of discomfort, disappointment and loss. (It has its satisfactions, too, but that’s not what this piece is about, so save the lecture about your 95-year-old great aunt who runs in marathons, travels to Europe by herself, and mows her lawn with a push-type lawnmower.) One of the ways we geezers hang on to our sanity, to the extent we’re fortunate enough to do that, is to settle into routines, patterns of behavior, that are just short of obsessive-compulsive in nature.

One of my routines has been to eat a small bag of Fritos at about three in the afternoon, just after I get up from my nap, (also a bit of patterned behavior) which has been taken in a large, wine-colored leather recliner. I also carry a bag of these salty little corn chips on my thrice-weekly golf outings, which I consume, along with a banana, “at the turn” from the first nine to the second. I also have an occasional bag at lunchtime with my bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. Fritos, in short, have been fully integrated into my life. I appreciate them, despite their excessive salt and carbohydrate content, and am grateful to the Frito-Lay corporation for making them available in such a convenient form.

Now for some years I have purchased my Fritos in case lots from Costco—44 packages, 1¼ ounces each, a month’s supply. The other day, however, as I wandered the aisles of Costco and prepared to place the cardboard box of Fritos in my cart, I noticed that the box is slightly larger than before—in fact, it now contains 50, not 44, little yellow and red bags of Fritos. Also, the price has gone up from $8.59 to $9.59. I shrugged and moved on. How can we hope to understand the mysteries of corporate marketing decisions?

Over the next few days, however, I noticed that the cute little bags of Fritos were not delivering their usual satisfying wallop. Something was missing. Consumption of a bag left me with an empty feeling. As I was eating my BLT one day, I dumped the entire bag on my plate, and realized that the bag was about 25 chips short. I examined the bag, and the secret was out! Frito-Lay had reduced the size of the minibag from 1¼ ounces to a single ounce—a 20% reduction! No wonder I felt this continued craving after I finished a bag. I had been victimized by the sleaziest of corporate maneuvers—raising the price of an item by stealthily reducing the quantity. Like George Bush’s administration, Frito-Lay had tried to put something over on me, and failed!

Now what makes this revolting development so frustrating is that absolutely nothing can be done about it, short of giving up Fritos in protest. I can understand that Frito-Lay might feel constrained to raise the price of an item, although the profitability of its parent corporation, Pepsico, has been rising steadily, and along with it, the value of its stock. Perhaps the increasing cost of fuel makes deliveries more expensive. Perhaps the corn market is in a bullish phase. Perhaps the bonuses of corporate executives had fallen below seven figures. But why do it this surreptitious, undercover, way? Do they believe that those of us who have folded Fritos into our lives through consumption of the minibags won’t notice? Opening a second bag at a sitting, thereby consumimg two ounces rather than an ounce and a quarter, is no option, because it would be playing right into their greedy hands.

So as you can see, life is tough here in Geezerville. Little things trump big things. This is a world in which the trivial becomes consequential and the consequential is relentlessly trivialized. Which leads me to more serious matters. Coping with the Frito-Lays of the world is as hopeless, apparently, as trying to bring down the Bush administration by pointing out its deviousness, dishonesty, and more outrageous manipulations

This leads us to the problem we face when the world really is turning to shit and no one else seems to notice. Or care.

Being ignored is a condition that older people must learn to live with—and why small bags of Fritos can loom large in our lives. However limited our long term horizon may be, however, we do have time on our hands to pay attention to the world. We have information, and in some cases, even wisdom. Younger people, given the conditions in American life, are busy getting and spending and raising their kids. They have no time for politics, economics, world affairs. They leave that to us, perhaps because we’re easy to ignore. We’re free to deplore; they’re free to ignore.

Consider this passage from a recent article by Congressman Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat:

What worries me almost as much as our misguided policy in Iraq is the fact that so many of my colleagues and so many citizens have become resigned to the fact that the war will go on. Congress is not being inundated with letters and phone calls and faxes and e-mails and street protests demanding an end to our presence in Iraq. President Bush’s re-election seems to have taken much of the energy out of the antiwar movement. My recent visit to Iraq only strengthened my belief that this war is wrong. And only renewed passionate dissent by the American people can end it.

And in an article in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, the author Mark Danner suggests that the euphoria over the apparent success of the January elections in Iraq was seriously misplaced. Indeed, Danner states, the elections brought to a head the ugly problematics of the Iraqi democracy-building project. The elections occurred only because U.S. forces effectively locked down the country; the Sunnis hardly participated at all; the real victors were the Kurds, who have the power to stop anything from happening, and who are extremely skeptical about the prospect of a unitary state. Thus it is not surprising that the insurgency continues unabated and that a government is still not in place.

But the American people (whatever that means in this day and age), seem blissfully unaware of what is happening in Iraq, only too willing to buy into the administration’s eagerness to have us believe that developments in Iraq represent steps toward something they call “democracy.” The populace at large seem to be quite incapable of anything like “passionate dissent” about anything in the public domain.

Or consider the failure of significant numbers of people to rise up in indignation over the actions of Congress and the president in the Terri Schiavo affair. The ruling neocons profess to believe that the government should have very few functions—except to wage war, subsidize the oil industry, and now to mess around in the private lives of American families. The polls show that most people didn’t approve of the actions of the Republican leadership in using the power of the federal government to intervene in what was a family dispute, but what are the consequences for the congresspersons who went along with this outrageous and cynical strategy, including our own Congresswoman Heather Wilson , or for the president himself? There have been no consequences so far as the headlines are dominated by the weekly trivial cause celebre.

Mr. Bush, you may recall, rushed home from Texas in the middle of the night to sign the bill that removed the Schiavo affair from the jurisdiction of the Florida State courts. He did this, he said, because he wanted to “err on the side of life,” something he had consistently failed to do in signing 127 death penalty warrants, some of them highly questionable, as governor of Texas, even mocking Carla Faye Tucker’s plaintive plea to be allowed to live so that she could do good in the world with her new found born-again Christianity (which is exactly George Bush’s life pattern, incidentally.) Moreover, it turns out that when he was governor of Texas, Bush promoted and signed into law a bill that authorizes physicians to remove life support from hopeless cases even over family objections. In other words, our president is a nasty little hypocrite, about this and a lot of other things.

Our next chance to make our voices heard will be the congressional elections next year. Are there any issues that would sweep the perpetrators of the war and the Terri Schiavo fiasco out of office? We shall see; but the prospects are not good.

Now a few favorable signs should be acknowledged. It is true that Mr. Bush’s approval ratings have dropped into the high forties; and that he is having no success whatever in convincing the American people that the Social Security System should be modified, if not destroyed, by the institution of so-called “personal accounts”. Moreover, the infamous Tom Delay, one of Heather Wilson’s mentors, seems to be covering up on the ropes while awaiting a knockout punch, and it appears increasingly unlikely that the Senate will approve the appointment of sworn enemy of the United Nations as U.S. Ambassador to that body.

Maybe the people out there are beginning to catch on. Or maybe they’re getting older and wiser. Or maybe the only thing that really matters is the price of Fritos.