Facing the consequences

There’s an important video among this week’s viral picks.

It’s a video involving 22-year-old Ohio resident Matthew Cordle and his confession to killing Vincent Canzani in a drunken driving incident.

In the video, Matthew explains how he got drunk in order to “get out of (his) head for a few hours” to escape his depression.

He then got into his truck and drove down I-670 in the wrong direction. This is when he hit and killed Canzani, a 61-year-old Navy veteran.

Recorded and published Sept. 3, the video has certainly earned its “viral” trophy, as it already has more than 1 million views.

And those views are earned, as Cordle does something unprecedented:.He confesses his crime and asks to feel the full wrath of the judicial system.

Just a few days later, an Ohio grand jury has charged Cordle with aggravated vehicular homicide.

If he is convicted of the crimes that he readily confesses to in his video, Cordle will face a maximum sentence of eight years in prison.

But is the video fair?

Throughout the 3 1/2-minute YouTube post, emotional music plays in the background, and the cinematography works to show Cordle as what seems like more of a victim than Canzani.

The video plays up Cordle’s attractiveness and shows images of what appear to be burns, making us sympathize with the man.

After watching the video, I couldn’t stop feeling bad for Matthew. And I had forgotten the true victim’s name entirely.

This entire column was going to be a bashing of Cordle’s choice and the rhetorical choices that present Cordle as a hero of the
mea culpa.

But that would be taking the situation too far in the other direction.

Ultimately, nobody is asking for the video or the statement to be praised.

It’s certainly commendable, but even the website that produced the video, Because I said I would, does not think Cordle should achieve hero status.

Drunken driving is still a serious issue that we’ve never seemed to fully grasp.

We’ve all gone through Driver’s Education and seen tape after tape of gruesome injuries and deaths revolving around drunken driving.

If those videos had any effect on us, there wouldn’t have been 207 drunken driving deaths in 2011 in Indiana alone.

Part of the problem is that we rarely see people take accountability anymore.

The media is full of individuals solemnly getting into the back of a cop car, or maybe sitting in a courtroom, simply taking everything in with a blank stare.

We rarely see anyone step forward and affirm that he or she screwed up.

We never want to be blamed for anything, and we certainly don’t want to be blamed for ending someone else’s life.

But Cordle took that blame.

So while his attractiveness is overplayed, musical empathy abounds and so many other rhetorical devices are jammed into one video, it all works in the big picture.

Matthew Cordle is just like you and me, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to force viewers to notice that.

­— sjostrow@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Sam Ostrowski on Twitter
@ostrowski_s_j.