This is getting a little old, isn’t it? An economic crisis is exciting for a year or two, but our national attention span isn’t built for this kind of sustained worrying.

It might have played well in olden times, before the invention of the three-minute pop song. For centuries, people really didn’t have anywhere to go, or anything more exciting to do than try on hats. So they didn’t mind having The Thirty Years’ War or sitting through a Shakespearean play stuffed with words like “howsomever” and “down-gyved.”

But decades of TV shows and Hollywood movies have taught us that events should have an easily understood plot and lots of action, everything turns out OK in the end, and it doesn’t take long to wrap things up.

So we’re more than ready to get back to the way things used to be, when a young stockbroker would buy a palatial mansion because he liked the mailbox. A middle manager would fly to Europe just to find a shorter line for lunch.

History may not be our strong suit (our strong suit used to be the uneven parallel bars; now it’s guessing the correct time), but we have learned that real life is basically the same as an episode of “My Name is Earl.” The United States sets out to make things right, and it succeeds.

Take World War II. Three and a half years and we were out of it with a first-place trophy. A sailor kissed a nurse in Times Square and the Japanese saw the photograph and said, “Jeez, we can’t compete with that; let’s start a new industry.” Before long, our sailors were kissing nurses in low-priced, fuel-efficient automobiles.

But now we’re caught in a financial maelstrom, and nobody seems to know the way out. Standard & Poor’s cut our credit rating from “AAA” to “A pleasure to have in class,” and there’s nothing the government can do except come up with an inspiring slogan that fits on a lapel button, then charge us a fee to wear one. Also, the House Ways and Means Committee is going to ask Jim Cramer to lower his voice.

The traditional political process clearly isn’t the answer.

High-level meeting to save the nation:

Obama: C’mon, let’s raise taxes. It’s like picking up money with a Swiffer.

Boehner: No, let’s cut spending by $4 trillion. Or just make it $2 trillion; I bet Rand Paul doesn’t really have any photos of me.

Obama: Hey, there’s Lieberman. Let’s see who can get closest to him with a chip shot.

Economists don’t seem to have a solution, either.

Economist A: We need to recalibrate our currency vis-à-vis the yuan and the euro, but it will be difficult. Of course, at this point the only easy thing we could do is redesign the dollar so it’s more fun to spend.

Economist B: I’ll get the Magic Markers.

No, the government has done everything in its power by employing fiscal stimulus and keeping the interest rates low. Constitutional experts thought they had found an obscure passage that held promise, but when they read it out loud, it sounded too much like a Nicolas Cage movie.

So we might have to swallow our pride and follow some other country’s example. Unfortunately, there aren’t many choices out there – not much but Canada.

By all accounts, things are going smoothly for our neighbor to the north, which, frankly, we had forgotten about after the last Winter Olympics. We knew there was something beyond Minnesota, but couldn’t remember whether it was an actual nation or just a place to rent canoes.

At this point, though, the average American is willing to try almost anything.

Canada. It’s like asking your little brother to help you with arithmetic.