I had only begun to digest this-I mean, to gape at such images and feel my heart start to thump double-time-when a short, intense but generally unthreatening-looking guy ran up to me, greeted me in English and asked, “Where you from?” It was sheer reflexes combined with a stubborn disinclination to go on the defensive, I guess, that made me say immediately, “ America.” The gist was the same as in those various murals and mobile art displays that, for example, showed a crippled Iranian veteran riding his wheelchair over the Stars and Stripes, or Uncle Sam being strafed by jet fighters. No, I don’t speak the language, but I understood perfectly. “I’m glad you don’t understand the language,” said my translator with an embarrassed laugh after a truck rumbled by filled with young men shouting slogans, their fists in the air. “Death to America” actually was no more than a prominent sub-theme, though one that easily caught my notice. I was with a group of foreign visitors to Iran’s annual film festival being led on a short, escorted visit to the massive outdoor celebration, which was, in fact, in honor of Islamic Revolution Day, Iran’s holiday honoring its birth as an Islamic Republic in 1979. But there are enough to fill one of Tehran’s grandest boulevards, Azadi Street, as far as the eye could see. I’m not sure how many people were at this event, since I have a hard time telling the difference between 50,000 and 100,000. It took a while before I calmed down enough to muse that this startling cultural baptism may have reflected a deliberate, and even shrewdly benign, strategy on the part of my Iranian hosts-show him the cliché first since everything to come will explode it. I was simply too giddy with amazement, too inoculated by a rush of adrenaline that outlasted the experience by an hour. It’s no tribute to my paltry reserves of courage to say that I was never scared, but I wasn’t. My first day in Iran they took me to the big “Death to America” march.
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