Vincent "Buddy" Cianci, who can win elections but not court cases, announced recently that he will run again for mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, a formerly industrial city with several spaghetti restaurants. I live 15 miles from Providence.

The city is following the path of a number of other American cities, which is to say taking a last stand around a last white mayor two before giving in as a rising African-American or Hispanic population brings on an unbroken line of non-white mayors. The mayor of Providence now is Dominican-American but, while the first minority anything is cause for weepy self-examination from the white folks, the second and third are stark takeover, the lowering of the flag.

In general, the last white mayor arises from whatever was that city's dominant ethnic group in 1962. Irish, Italian, Czech, Polish, even piney woods white are all welcome to apply, just as long as your people were in the city before all the factories closed. If they're not thuggish, the last one or two white mayors are chamber of commerce beanbags, guys who 'll take any honor, from Rotary Club "Man of The Year," to mayor. No plaque too small to hang on their wall.

As a rule of thumb, a city is due for its last white mayor when you walk into a restaurant called "Angelo's" and the guy out front is Brian, Angelo's grandson, there are 15 Guatemalans working in the kitchen and the dishwasher is Haitian. Brian lives in the suburbs, 15 miles from the "ristorante." The Guatemalans and the Haitian live in the neighborhood, which used to be Italian. Brian's grandfather lived in an apartment over the restaurant. You ever hit a "ristorante" in New York's Little Italy? The front of the place looks like Palermo but the kitchen sounds like Peru.

You get the last white mayor soon after all the boxers in the local Golden Gloves are black and Hispanic for several years. You get the last white mayor just after the bingo caller at Our Lady of Hope starts calling the numbers in Creole. You get the last white mayor when the newspapers start calling 'em "gang killings" instead of "gangland-style executions."

I don't approve or disapprove of any of it but I've lived through it and I'm a squatter now in a New England city with a surging African-American and Hispanic population and there is a Casey on the city council and the mayor's name is Flanagan but I go to the Golden Gloves every year and I see it coming. We'll have our Buddy Cianci someday and the city will change, as it changed when my French-Canadian ancestors arrived and clotted the streets with their glottal French and their peasant-flavored Roman Catholicism, an affront to the good Protestants who owned the cotton mills.

Buddy's been in office a couple times before, done time for the kind of creaky malfeasance that smells of 1938. He's running again, hoping not to miss his chance to be the last one.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's book, "Between Wealth and Welfare A Liberal Curmudgeon in America" is available for Nook and Kindle.