Perhaps I am the only one who immediately thought of Aidan Maese-Czeropki when I read this Brit’s complaints about “God Save the King,” but that’s the way my mind works.

Apparently the University of Bristol has dropped the UK national anthem from its graduation ceremony, and that decision has roiled the traditionalists in Britain. “University bosses have been accused of hating British culture and pandering to wokes,” one paper reported. The deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, posted on X: “If Bristol University are too ashamed of their British heritage, presumably they no longer want to be subsidised by [the] British taxpayer?” Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said that “universities should stand up for our British values and stop giving in to woke ideology.” But Guardian lifestyle columnist Tim Dowling took the predictable progressive line: all that traditional stuff is behind the times, stuffy and boring. “God Save the King is not a good song. It plods. It goes nowhere,” he writes. “The first three lines end with the same word, as if no one could be bothered to come up with a rhyme for king. Obviously this made things easy the first time they had to change it to queen, but there’s no historical evidence that anyone was thinking that far ahead.”

Wouldn’t it be great if the British national anthem were something flashy and fun like “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen? (That’s my suggestion, not Tim’s.) No, it wouldn’t be great; Dowling doesn’t get it, just as so many people don’t get it, just as Aiden the Sex Machine doesn’t get it, just as those who complain about our national anthem don’t get it.

“It” is the importance of, indeed the crucial importance, of traditions in holding societies, cultures and nations together. Traditions and long-standing institutions are metaphorical glue that keeps civilizations from unraveling, which is one reason revolutionaries and radicals frequently go after them first when they are seeking to plow under a government or a constitution.

The same is true of the Capitol: it is important because of what the structure symbolizes, what has occurred there and who has served his or her nation there. The Congressional aide who treated it as a rutting station has indicated in his statements after being fired that he doesn’t see what the big deal is. It’s just sex, after all (this was also Bill Clinton’s defenders’ fallback position in defending Bill getting hummers in the Oval Office. It was also “just the White House.”)

As it happens, a popular and successful British series, “The Crown,” has just completed its sixth and final season. The show has had its artistic ups and downs, but the one concept it conveyed eloquently is the value of traditions, and the seriousness with which members of the Royal Family, the responsible ones anyway, have regarded their role in protecting the culture and a united nation.

I have a personal connection to “God Save The Queen” that illustrates for me the power of tradition. Next September a theater group I started as a first year law student at Georgetown will celebrate its 50th consecutive year in continuous operation, the only student-run law school theater group in the U.S. When I decided to direct Gilbert and Sullivan shows at the school (before the organization had its eventual name, the Georgetown Gilbert & Sullivan Societ …GG&SS to its friends), I decided to introduce a practice begun by the venerable Harvard Gilbert & Sullivan Players, which dominated my time in college. The group, founded by Robert Benchley more than a century ago, began every performance of the Victorian duo’s works by asking the audience to rise and sing “our national anthem,” evoking Victoria and the original Savoy productions. I had the Law Center’s audiences do the same—not because I love the song, but because it established the unbroken line of a musical theater tradition that reaches back to the 19th century, and reminded both the cast and the audience like they were part of something greater than themselves and worth preserving.

This is the function of traditions wherever they are, whether it is the seventh inning stretch and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” or playing “Taps” at my father’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. Traditions unify. They remind us that we are part of a great cultural and historical tapestry, contributing to it, and being absorbed by it in the process. It is foolish and destructive to pick at the threads of that tapestry, unless one’s intention is to unravel it.

God Save the King.

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Pointer: Curmie