Shelburne: This must be “the time to dance”

Have you heard of a disease called “tarantismus”? I hadn’t.

Evidently it was a much-feared scourge in Italy during the years when America was being colonized (the 16th and 17th centuries).

Supposedly, victims of this now-unheardof sickness caught it when tarantulas bit them (hence the name of the ailment).

Symptoms of the malady included pain like a bee sting and extreme drowsiness. Most victims could hardly stay awake. (Like some folks I preach to? Hmm.)

Some of the top doctors in the early 1700s said that without quick treatment many of their patients with this disease soon died.

The cure they recommended included no medications. Instead the doctors prescribed music and dancing.

One famous British sawbones wrote that if patients danced twelve hours a day for three or four days, their symptoms usually vanished.

Maybe that explains what we’re seeing on TV nowadays. I’m unaware of an outbreak of tarantulas, but about the same time that the Covid pandemic hit, television viewers all across our land also got hit with a barrage of weird dancing.

Almost every major advertiser on the tube suddenly decided to sell their product by a display of wiggling hips. Everything from dog food to breakfast cereal to arthritis medications is now being hawked by swaying bodies and fast and fancy steps.

I haven’t figured out why watching a grandpa jiving like a teenager is supposed to make me hurry out to buy toothpaste or car insurance, but it must work. Big companies are paying big dollars to dazzle us with dancing.

I find myself wondering what triggered this new craze.

The Bible does tell us that there is “a time to dance” (Eccl. 3:4), but almost every scripture that mentions dancing does so to contrast it to a time of sorrow. “Maidens will dance,” God told Jeremiah.

“I will turn their mourning into gladness.” Curiously, that Jeremiah verse (31:13) does say that the dancers will include both young men and old. Just like today’s TV ads.

Although most of us in more traditional churches stopped doing it a long time ago, the Bible does tell us to dance.

“Let them praise his name with dancing,” the

Good Book says (Ps. 149:3). But the nutty folks I see wiggling their hips on my TV every night don’t appear to be worshiping.

If anything, they’re trying to appeal to my carnality. But my message for those advertisers is blunt but simple: at leastfor me, it ain’t working.