On Bashing...

I'm a fan of the CBS reality series Big Brother. I've been addicted to it since the very first season, and we're now on the fifth season. I make a point of never missing a telivised episode, and I frequent Joker's Updates boards for the latest live feed updates and Big Brother discussion.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of HG(houseguest) bashing that goes on in the boards. All of the HGs are bashed, but some more than others. Right now the bashing that bothers me the most involves 'cowboy' and 'the fitness twins'.
Cowboy's real name is Michael and he's from Oklahoma. He was part a big part of this years theme, 'Project DNA', when they placed him in the house with the sister he never met, 'Nakomis', whose real name is Jennifer.
The Fitness Twins are the other big part of Project DNA. Adria and Natalie switched in and out of the house every few days for five weeks... but the other HGs were not aware that there was two... they only new about Adria. After successfully fooling the others for five weeks, they both got to be in the house at the same time... as seperate individuals. Needless to say, now that they are both in the house, they have targets on their backs. Cowboy and Nakomis were able to avoid a similar fate since they didn't even know about each other's existence prior to coming into the house and, quite frankly, they're polar opposites and don't really get along.
At the most recent nomination ceremony, Nakomis put up the twins for eviction. When Adria won the veto challenge and took herself off the block, she then put her own brother up in her place. So now Natalie and Cowboy are on the block with one, most likely Natalie, to be evicted tomorrow night.
But about the bashing that bothers me so much... Cowboy gets bashed for a number of reasons... from his appearance, to his intelligence, to the way he runs around with his nose stuck up particular people's asses. But the bashing that bothers me the most, is when people make fun of his dialect. Yes... that's right... his dialect. All of us speak a particular dialect of whatever our native language is. The standard or formal dialect may differ greatly from what many of us speak at home. Most of us, through the course of public education, learn the standard dialect, and are able to speak it when appropriate. But when just hangin' with friends, all of our education can go to the wayside in favor of our own local, familial, racial or personal dialects. And some people never really get a good grasp on the formal dialect in the first place. Cowboy is one such person.
So why does it upset me so? Because I like accents and dialects... they add color to our often too standardized language. And from a linguistical perspective, no accent and no dialect is better than any other. One is simply proscribed by the school systems for the sake of standarization.
Standardization is good... don't get me wrong. Our civilization would not have progressed as far as it has without standard units of measure, standard money, standard roadways... and of course standard language. Such standarization brings unity to people and places near and far. But what does that have to do with Cowboy?
Cowboy is just a security guard from Oklahoma, with aspirations of landing his own sitcom after his Big Brother gig is up. Well guess what... even if Cowboy didn't speak in such a heavy, non-standard dialect, odds are he won't ever be landing his own sitcom. I predict he'll be back in Oklahoma standing guard and doing security checks. And I bet his dialect is good enough for that job.
I could write more about that subject, but I haven't even touched on the twin bashing that goes on on Joker's. And actually, I don't feel like getting into that now, so perhaps I'll save it for another time... or perhaps not.