Last week, TCI finally got around to hooking up cheap cable in the dorms. The down-side is my priorities have gotten totally skewed. I just have to record every single episode of “Northern Exposure” while I have the chance, it’s just THAT important!

The up-side is that most of Buchanan Hall sticks to their rooms now, which helps to cut down on incidents of public nose-picking and Greg-abuse. I swear it’s like the booger-eaters inquisition over there sometimes. Every other resident has their own personal excuse to make everyone else’s life a little less enjoyable.

When I was a kid, TV was unwatchable crap. “Three’s Company” was considered a must-see back then. To this day, if I hear that twangy, pseudo-funk guitar intro and that swing-choir hepcat croon, “Come and knock on our door,” I go into convulsions. I think it may have been responsible for a rash of spontaneous human combustion incidents throughout the U.S. during the late ’70s and early ’80s.

I still can’t believe that a universe governed by a benevolent deity could ever allow anything so irritating to come into existence without a really good reason, like Charleton Heston. This was before Suzanne Sommers really came into her own and invented the thigh master. No wonder I turned agnostic. We grew up in the sticks and didn’t have cable.

Though I complained loudly about the lack of HBO, it wasn’t all bad. I watched a lot of PBS. I found the programs educational. They were highly informative and very stimulating. Of course, I was mostly watching for the nudity.

One Sunday night I caught a glimpse of some French woman’s breast on Foreign Film Theater and I was hooked. From that moment on, I started cruising PBS like Eddie Murphy at a public restroom.

Every Sunday night at 10 p.m. I was in front of my little black and white set, eyes forward on nudie alert, just waiting for the subtlest clue that nudity was afoot, abreast, or even abutt. I accidentally exposed myself to a variety of cultures while a variety of cultures were exposing themselves to me, and I was loving it. I probably didn’t see more than three minutes of nudity over the course of five years, but it didn’t keep me from trying.

Personally, I think cable has made our kids lazy. If they had to scrabble for soft-core porn the way I did as a kid, we wouldn’t have all these little sociopaths running around. I blame the premium channels with their easy nudity and saucy language. Kids these days just don’t appreciate skank because they don’t have to work for it.

I have seen junior high school kids at malls showing absolute disinterest in things that would have made my head spin at 18. Curiosity about sex is perfectly natural. Nudity in the right context is actually pretty healthy for kids. Labeling the nude human form “dirty” is really just another way to objectify it. When you make forbidden fruit of the female body, boys grow up thinking that sex is dirty, and once you start on the road to hell, you might as well keep on truckin’! So a great many men have a perverse, juvenile attitude about sex their entire lives.

Speaking of perverse juveniles who SHOULD be worried about going to hell, somebody needs to revive Dante Alighieri so he can invent another circle for college professors who run around like Ghengis Khan with priapism, pillaging the populace and trying to put their penises where they DO NOT BELONG! Reservation for Simonson, table for one. Mike Simonson’s parents probably made Carrie’s mom look like Dr. Ruth in comparison. I am sure they are fine people. Just as I am sure that Ted Bundy’s parents were upstanding members of the community, maybe even Masons.

Now that I think about it, every school I have been in since kindergarten has featured some drooling pervert who could not keep his priorities as straight as his stick. At the time, we thought it was pretty normal.

When you are 15, 15-year-old girls look pretty good, so it only seems natural that your 50-year-old biology teacher would want to put all the cheerleaders up front so he can look down their blouses when he is lecturing about osmosis or mitochondria, dropping his pencil every 15 minutes.

When you start to mature and/or your testosterone levels drop, you think back and it makes you sick to your stomach. Then you hear that the guy is still teaching and it puts you right off your “Xena, Warrior Princess” for a month. I will have to watch C-SPAN just to get the taste of copper out of my mouth.

I have a unified field theory which governs how we can change attitudes about sex, get children to learn, raise test scores, reduce teen pregnancy rates, increase public television pledges and put a little salt peter in the diets of sexually rampaging professors and other “professionals.” As usual, educational television gives us all the answers.

I think we should outlaw all nudity from television except for those channels which have major educational content. Let kids watch as much television as they want and believe me, they won’t want to. But when they do it might actually be good for them.

If the only place you could find nudity would be in National Geographic specials, this country would experience a renaissance that would make the Enlightenment look like a 40-watt bulb.

So phone your representative in Congress. I believe we can make educational nudity a reality before the end of the millennium.

I love you, PBS! My check is in the mail! And remember: We’re all in this together!

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs.