“New York’s wide-ranging civic conversation about the World Trade Center site degenerated into rhetoric that ricocheted off on all sorts of tangents at the start of the second round of public hearings on the fate of Ground Zero.” Officials in charge of the process seem to be trapped by the dual expectations of the public that a) public opinion will not be ignored, and b) something will eventualy rise on the WTC site, even though whatever it is will not come close to satisfying all constituencies.