There’s a particular story that I’m surprised anyone is still shameless enough to tell. Like commedia dell’arte, it’s populated by stock imbeciles who bumble through recognizable scenarios. Unlike commedia dell’arte, it’s presented as fact in the dull language of reportage.

The characters in this story will be familiar to anyone who’s ever skimmed the Bloomberg headlines or found themselves in the unsettlingly large number of places where a wall-mounted flatscreen plays a muted CNBC program with the closed captioning on. There’s the éminence grise, known as Silent, who watches the others with reserved disdain; the profligate, individualist Boomer, whose cartoonish ability to convince himself that his self-interest aligns with the greater good makes everyone else hate him; the thinly drawn caricature of middle-child syndrome known as the X-er, an attention-starved, grown-up latchkey kid who’s constantly aggrieved that the others won’t make more mention of him; the Millennial whipping boy, whose sloth and entitlement know no bounds and whose mercurial whims place beloved cultural institutions such as Applebee’s in constant peril; and the Z, a child who, carried on the current of his inscrutable motivations, only stops playing Minecraft long enough to snack on laundry detergent in hopes of achieving fame online.

Only the shameless could depict contemporary life as a series of fairy tales in which the cascading feuds of these oafish stereotypes explain the entire world. Perhaps, then, it’ll come as no surprise that Steve Bannon has become the Charles Perrault of the genre, spinning some of the most heavy-handed generational fables into a “documentary” called Generation Zero. But even more respectable outlets deploy the same unsubstantiated tropes.