And so ground zero remains a pit, a hole, a void. As The New York Post has noticed, more time has passed since George Pataki first unveiled the "final design" of the Freedom Tower than it took to build the Empire State Building. For New Yorkers this saga is a raucous political narrative whose cast of characters includes a rapacious real-estate developer, a seriously irritating architect with even more irritating designer eyeglasses, a governor with self-delusional presidential ambitions and a mayor obsessed with bringing New York the only target that may rival the Freedom Tower as terrorist bait, the Olympics.

But there is another, national narrative here, too. Bothered as New Yorkers may be by what Charles Schumer has termed the "culture of inertia" surrounding ground zero, that stagnation may accurately reflect most of America's view about the war on terror that began with the slaughter of more than 2,700 at the World Trade Center almost four years ago. Though the vacant site is a poor memorial for those who died there, it's an all too apt symbol for a war on which the country is turning its back.