“Haven’t you always wanted a monkey?” is the question posed by Barenaked Ladies in their 1990 cult hit “If I Had $1000000.” The line strikes a chord in all of us, because — deep down — everybody wants a monkey.

This is certainly true in the case of a paralyzed Sioux City woman who faces eviction because she is training a monkey to help her with simple tasks. Her landlord cites health and odor concerns in enforcing his no pets policy, insisting that the ape must go. A sad story of a disabled woman forced to part with an animal upon which she depends for comfort and companionship, right? Wrong. Simian servitude may sound like a good idea, but the consequences may be more than we’re prepared to deal with.

For many, monkey ownership is a dream deeply rooted in childhood. For some, the dream lives on into adulthood. In any case, we’ve all fantasized about having a furry primate pal to serve and entertain us. But at the same time, most of us are wistfully resigned to the fact that having a monkey, like flying and quality pornography, will never be more than a pleasant dream.

However, with the tireless advance of progress and technology, we find ourselves moving ever closer to an age of instantaneous gratification. Right now, at your local coffee shop, you can order a latte in any flavor from Dijon Mesquite Bar-B-Que to Cool Ranch Mocha.

Say you want to watch Uruguayan pro wrestling — somewhere there’s a cable channel that brings it to you 24-hours-a-day.

Maybe you’re in the mood for an instructional video on sausage-making. You need look no further than the World Wide Web to order it on-line with a few deft clicks of the mouse.

Nude stamp collecting? You got it. Check your local listings.

With current trends, is it so ridiculous to suppose that, within 10 years, household monkeys may become a reality? The prospect is dizzying. It seems a capitalistic inevitability that some visionary will develop an inexpensive way to breed, train and disinfect monkeys in mass quantities for sale to the general public. We may not be far from a day when anyone with a few bucks to spend can swing by the monkey shop and pick up a rhesus to mow the lawn or help with the dishes.

Think of it: Friendly, semi-intelligent creatures that can be trained to answer the door, mail letters, pay the pizza guy, entertain party guests and urinate on people you don’t like. Easy to replace and requiring only minimal care and feeding, many might find monkeys preferable to children. And unlike children, monkeys can be beaten when they make mistakes.

It’s difficult not to get excited over the much higher standard of living monkey servants would most certainly provide. But the effects of a readily available monkey supply would be much farther-reaching than they might appear at first glance.

For starters, there would be serious labor concerns associated with widespread monkey employment. As industry and specialized trades become more and more mechanized, monkey labor becomes an increasingly cost-effective option for overhead-cutting, downsizing corporate types. Why pay a human worker minimum wage when a monkey can push the same button for the cost of a wire cage and the occasional banana? God help us if Nike should ever manage to make the switch to monkey labor.

And if the jobs of emaciated Vietnamese children are not safe, how safe are yours and mine? We think pretty highly of ourselves, but how many of us can honestly say our jobs couldn’t be done reasonably well by a well-trained ape motivated by promises of food or threats of electric shock? Be honest now.

Students, of course, would be among the first to feel the backlash of a monkey economy. Budget conscious administrators would not hesitate to replace work-study students and lower level bureaucrats with cheap monkey workers. It wouldn’t be long before we started seeing monkey RAs, TAs, DPS officers, even (ahem) university presidents.

As monkey labor becomes more specialized, training would become increasingly advanced, until one day the monkeys themselves would start going to college. Eventually, the government would begin training deadly assassin monkeys; that is, if they’re not already. Before long, we would see the beginnings of a new ape-dominated class of society, and perhaps — who knows — the dawn of a whole new social order in which humans were dumb animals subordinate to the will of chimps and orangutans, not unlike in the movie “Planet of the Apes.”

So think twice before you shell out that $15,000 — the going rate for a fully trained helper monkey. Sure, monkeys are cute, clever, and easily exploited. But they’re not the answer to our problems. The key to humankind’s continued domination of the planet lies in the tried and true method of exploiting and oppressing other human beings. Leave the monkeys out of it.

Josh Raulerson is junior in journalism and mass communication and English from Decorah.