The subject of this post is Holden Matthews, age 21, of Louisiana.

He was a “frustrated musician” whose parents didn’t approve and who worked in one of those outlier genres that make average people nervous. He’s the son of a cop, and thus grew up with the idea of violent abuses of power (though the story goes out of its way to say the cop “knew nothing” and “was heartbroken” about it).

And, as the story goes to great lengths to show, he’s a complete and utter drooling idiotic dumbass.

• He’s a racist (though the AP found a Facebook friend who denies this).
• He decided to act out his racism by setting three black churches on fire. What good did that do, even by a racist’s definition of “good,” besides wasting some black people’s money?
• He might not have even come up with that idea on his own – an older musician in his genre (who’s an infamous racist) also set three churches on fire.

If his dumbass motive isn’t enough for you, he was also a dumbass about the crimes themselves.

• He drove his dad’s pickup truck to all the crime scenes, past a bunch of surveillance cameras.
• He carried his cellphone with him to all three crime scenes.
• On the day of the first fire, he drove to his local Walmart in his dad’s pickup and bought a gas can, some automotive cloths, and a lighter, using his debit card. Then he left the gas can behind at one of the crime scenes. (The story doesn’t say it was the first one, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he bought an arsonist’s toolkit with his own fucking debit card three times.)

Matthews didn’t just fail to cover his tracks; he did everything but order a case of “I AM AN ARSONIST” custom T-shirts and wear them every day. Or maybe he did that, too. The article doesn’t say what make the cops start looking at him, exactly. Maybe he ran his mouth, or dropped his driver’s license, or stopped on the way to a crime scene and stuck his face right in one of those surveillance cameras. With an ass this dumb, the possibilities are endless.

The Seven Deadly Sins are incomplete. Sure, some people do wrong because they’re full of pride, envy, greed, and so on, but some other people do wrong because they’re just that fucking foolish.

P.S. He’s the third face of evil because “ignorance” or “delusion” is the third cause of wrongdoing in one of those lists the Pali Canon is so fond of.