‘Change a nose and rewrite history” is the message out of Brooklyn today, and it’s coming out of the battle for a statue.

Commissioned for the Brooklyn headquarters of New York’s fire department, “Flag Raising At Ground Zero,” was to be a bronze monument loosely based on New Jersey photographer Tom Franklin’s image of three firefighters raising the American flag against the backdrop of the World Trade Center rubble.

Franklin happened to immortalize three white firefighters in the shot, but the department and the artists decided to make the moment symbolic instead, and depict white, black and Hispanic firefighters working together instead.

The idea was to “honor no one in particular, but everyone who made the supreme sacrifice,” according to Fire Department spokesman Frank Gibbon.

But in the town where Branch Rickey embraced Jackie Robinson half a century ago, matters of race hasn’t gotten any easier, and a fight quickly sprung up.

A number of people – including members of the Vulcan Society, a group representing black firefighters in the FDNY – applauded the effort. But others weren’t so happy. They claimed the artists were trying to “rewrite history,” that this was “yet another case” of “political correctness run amok.” (As in, “Political correctness is running amok! Get the steel cage and the tazers!”) The idea, I suppose, is that our precious legacy of white men raising flags for photographers is under assault by a vast Orwellian mob of PC do-gooders.

Nevermind that there are other differences from the photo, like that the arm of the statue’s right-side firefighter is about forty-five degrees higher than that of his photographic counterpart, or that the statue’s flag is waving in the wind instead of hanging limp as it did for Franklin’s lens. And I haven’t heard anyone complain that the soon-to-be-bronzed firefighter on the left looks a good fifty pounds lighter than the figure that inspired him. Maybe all that running amok burnt off a few calories.

The monochromatic statue couldn’t depict actual skin color, so the changes in question basically came down to changing a few basic facial characteristics, a matter of a little more clay on the model here and a little less there.

But the important fact for columnists, pundits and angry women in plaid jackets on CNN’s “Talk Back Live” was the apparent race of the three men involved, not their symbolic act or the potential legacy of the Sept. 11 attacks themselves. Getting lucky counts in America, and three white firefighters got lucky enough to be standing in front of a camera at the right moment. So they win the right to be in the staTuesday, not some crazy multiracial interlopers from Staten Island, or wherever.

The truth is that Franklin’s portrait will live for years on the covers of Time/Life retrospectives and collectable plates from the Bradford Exchange, while the Brooklyn Three would have collected pigeon droppings in relative anonymity.

So if a fire company and an artist thought in the meantime that changing the relative width of a firefighter’s nose would express the idea that people of all races, nationalities and religions worked, suffered and died that day, I say more power to them and why should anyone else have cared?

When so much energy can still be spent fighting over the colors of a monochromatic staTuesday, you have to wonder whether Sept. 11 changed anything in this country at all.