If you go by the depictions in the news and movies, Iran is exclusively made up of experimental nuclear weapons, angry bearded mobs, and silent, oppressed females. And while the country may indeed have its fair share of all three of those, the reality is a far cry from what you'd expect. I spent almost a year in Iran, and I was amazed to discover ...

5 "Death to America" Is Quickly Going Out of Style

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One morning in Tehran I found myself in the middle of an anti-America protest. Instead of cars, the streets were packed with a mass of people chanting in Farsi: "Marg bar Amrika," they sang. "Death to America." Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered to commemorate the Islamic Revolution, burning effigies and waving around reversible signs printed with "Down with America" on one side and "Down with Israel" on the other. I thought the warnings about these protests from various state departments and foreign ministries were alarmist pandering -- is Iran really just a constant parade of jingoistic fury?

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This is your standard Tuesday commute.

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Actually, no: While I had stumbled across one of the largest celebrations of the Islamic Revolution ever, the reality is that the "Death to America" stuff is actually going out of style. Everyone from politicians to newspaper editors has basically said, "Guys, you're kinda making us look like dicks," and popular opinion is with them. If you arranged every Iranian presidential candidate since the '90s on a "Lotsa Death" to "Cool It With the Death" continuum, candidates on the latter end have been vastly more successful than those who have adopted a more expressly pro-death-of-America stance.

For example, former president Mohammad Khatami is best known for pursuing a "dialogue among civilizations" with the U.N. and won his election and re-election through multiple consecutive landslides. Current president Hassan Rouhani ran on a "less death, more talking" platform as well and went home with a respectable 50 percent of the vote, while the more pro-death candidates were stuck scraping the bottom of the voting barrel.

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Although we have to admit, a few "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" congressmen would make C-SPAN vastly more watchable.

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And I can say that in everyday interactions people in Iran are nice to foreigners -- even the youths in Revolutionary Guard uniforms on the bus are pleasant. So the chanters are extremists, and they're not even that extreme. It turns out "Death to [thing I don't like]" is a fairly common political colloquialism. In just the past 34 years, Iranians have chanted for "death" to Russia, England, France, Israel, and Saddam Hussein. The chant changes to match the hot topic of the moment. As a movement, it's more analogous to any of the numerous times Americans have casually compared something to Nazism than it is a metaphorical terrorist powder keg getting ready to blow.