You might want to take notes, because I’m about to explain The Rules.

Frankly, The Rules have always seemed self-evident to me, but in the post-Don Imus world, they are apparently not. Witness Jeff Vandergrift and Dan Lay, two New York shock jocks who call themselves “JV and Elvis.” They were suspended without pay last week after an Asian-American group took exception to an on-air prank call supposedly made to a Chinese restaurant. The tone of the bit can be inferred from the fact that the caller places an order for “slimp flied lice.”

The incident has helped fuel the hand-wringing post-Imus debate about free speech and supposed double standards of offense. People claim that in a coarse and irreverent culture, it’s difficult to know where the line is – especially since it seems to be in different places for different people. Or, as Time magazine asked in a recent headline: Who Can Say What?

Apparently, there is some confusion out there. Well, I’m here to clear it up. You ready? You got your notepad? OK, here are The Rules. Well, actually, there’s just the one:

Don’t be a bully.

That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

Don Imus is not unemployed because he called some black women “nappy-headed hos.” Had he said that about Oprah Winfrey or Condoleezza Rice, yes, people would have been offended, and there would have been protests. But he probably would have survived.

See, Winfrey and Rice are powerful women and public figures. But Imus attacked college girls. Meaning relatively anonymous young women, most of them black, who were minding their business, when this guy – white, older, wealthier – mugged them. So the angry response was not just about race and sex; it was also about the imbalance of power, the big picking on the small.

It was about Imus being a bully.

While a coarse and irreverent people will tolerate and even celebrate breaches of decorum and the slaughter of sacred cows, one thing folks won’t put up with, one thing that riles something deep in human nature, is somebody who picks on someone smaller.

Understand that and the questions people have been asking seem a lot less vexing.

Why do blacks get more leeway in what they say about whites than vice versa? For that matter, why do women get more leeway than men, gays more than straights, workers more than bosses? Simple: Human nature always sides with the less powerful. When the little guy hits the big one, it’s audacity. When the big guy hits the little one, it’s cruelty.

How could Borat get away with saying the kinds of things for which Imus was pilloried? Also simple. With Borat as with Archie Bunker before him, the humor is constructed such that they themselves are the butt of the joke. We are invited to laugh at their ignorance. “JV and Elvis,” by contrast, invite us to laugh at some Chinese guy whose English is imperfect. They invite us to be bullies.

It is an invitation popular culture makes often. We are encouraged to belittle the most vulnerable under the guise of deconstructing political correctness. I intend no defense of PC when I say that argument is a fig leaf of respectability for bullies who are really only doing what bullies have always done.

So you’ll forgive me if I am unimpressed by earnest questions about who can say what, when. The fact is, most of us already know the answer, instinctively if not intellectually. Imus was undone not by government censors but by market forces. The moral of this story, then, is not that free speech is under siege.

It is, rather, that that even in a coarse and irreverent nation, The Rules still apply.