Do Hawaiian’s need an Esquire?

Wherever you go, there you are. So it is with people and debates. Wherever people gather, differences of opinion arise.

Daniel Rosen, Esquire, decries the Star-Bulletin’s position on the Akaka Bill. In a steamy rebuttal to the rule ‘don’t argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel,’ Rosen slices and dices both the local newspaper and various elected officials in what can only be described as a fit of class oneupsmanship.

The use of Esquire in the byline of Rosen’s HawaiiReporter article seems unusual in the context of the class distinctions created by the newspaper and the Akaka Bill and the movement for Hawaiian sovereignty. According to Webster’s, Esquire is a title appended to a lawyer’s surname. Rosen is a lawyer.

Another definition for Esquire is that of a young nobleman, an attendant to a knight, an officer in service to a king, or a country squire. It seems to me that if Hawaiians ever get a king and any degree of sovereignty as a result of the Akaka Bill, said king may need a nobleman, or perhaps a legal attendant, or a country squire. Rosen probably won’t be on the list.
Wikipedia sums up Esquire on a contemporary note, seemingly more fitting to the situation at hand. An Esquire is ‘a person of certain social status; always rather vague in its extent, the term carries little social distinction today.’ Is Rosens’s vitriolic opposition to the desire of others to increase their social status merely an exhibition of his fear that his own social status will be diminished via passage of the Akaka Bill?

What better way to enhance your own social status than to imply in public that your opponents on a particular issue of disagreement are Nazis ‘following the advice of another Nazi?’