IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED – CALL AN AIRSTRIKE

If At First You Don't Succeed

In May 2010, during a concentrated series of interventions across San Francisco, Banksy placed a small child wearing a gas mask high on a wall at the intersection of Broadway and Columbus Avenue in North Beach. Beside the figure, in large red capital letters, appears the instruction:

IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED – CALL AN AIRSTRIKE

The image is characteristically economical. The child stands almost passively, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and carrying what appears to be a small bag, while the oversized gas mask transforms an otherwise ordinary young figure into someone prepared for chemical warfare. The red text occupies far more space than the child himself, turning a familiar piece of motivational advice into something brutally disproportionate.

Banksy takes the reassuring proverb “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again” and replaces persistence with military escalation. Failure no longer leads to another attempt. It leads to overwhelming force.

A Child Prepared for War

The child is what prevents the work from functioning merely as a clever slogan.

Banksy repeatedly introduces children into situations created by adults—beside bombs, beneath surveillance cameras, behind armed policemen or surrounded by prohibitions. Here the child appears neither frightened nor surprised. He is simply wearing the equipment necessary to exist in the world implied by the sentence beside him.

That normality is disturbing. A gas mask should represent an emergency, yet Banksy's figure wears it almost like an everyday accessory. The contrast between childhood and military technology recalls Bomb Hugger, Happy Choppers and Mona Lisa with Rocket Launcher, works in which the machinery of warfare is inserted into situations where it manifestly does not belong.

The strategy is not to depict violence itself. Banksy generally leaves the explosion outside the frame. Instead, he shows the strange cultural environment in which the possibility of violence has become ordinary.

Call an Airstrike

The sentence is deliberately excessive. An airstrike represents almost the opposite of the careful second attempt proposed by the original proverb: distant, technologically sophisticated and massively destructive.

The work is therefore easily read as satire of the reliance of powerful states—particularly the United States and its allies—on aerial military force. Contemporary commentary immediately interpreted the mural in this anti-war context.

But the wording is broader and more interesting than a simple attack on American foreign policy. Banksy converts a philosophy of perseverance into a philosophy of escalation. If the first solution fails, do not reconsider the problem; simply apply more force. The joke works because that logic is recognizable well beyond warfare.

There is also an important qualification to make. Versions of the phrase “If at first you don't succeed, call in an airstrike” circulated in military humor before Banksy's mural. Banksy did not invent the underlying joke. What he did was appropriate it, alter it slightly, enlarge it across a San Francisco wall and place a child in a gas mask beside it. That visual context transforms a military one-liner into an anti-war image.

Banksy in San Francisco

The mural belongs to Banksy's significant 2010 intervention in San Francisco, undertaken around the American release and promotion of Exit Through the Gift Shop. During the visit, works appeared across the Mission District, Chinatown, North Beach and other parts of the city.

These included Peaceful Hearts Doctor, the Native American figure incorporating a No Trespassing sign, This'll Look Nice When It's Framed, and several rats. Contemporary observers were documenting the new works almost immediately; Thomas Hawk photographed Call An Airstrike on 6 May 2010, while Eva Blue photographed it on 8 May, giving us unusually precise evidence for its appearance.

Its location was particularly conspicuous. Rather than appearing at eye level, the child and text were positioned high above the intersection of Broadway and Columbus, overlooking one of North Beach's busiest urban corridors.

The elevated placement works beautifully with the language of the piece. An airstrike is, by definition, something delivered from above. Banksy's warning literally looks down upon the street.

From Graffiti to Protected Landmark

Unlike many works from Banksy's American visits, Call An Airstrike has survived. Later documentation records the mural at 270 Columbus Avenue, and it has been protected behind transparent covering. Wikimedia Commons continues to catalogue the Broadway and Columbus work among Banksy's surviving San Francisco interventions.

The protection creates the familiar Banksy paradox. A work originally produced using the visual language of unauthorized graffiti becomes sufficiently culturally valuable that the wall owner takes measures to prevent anyone else from doing to Banksy's work precisely what Banksy did to the wall.

But survival is particularly valuable here because the architecture and scale remain part of the image. The tiny masked child is dwarfed by both the enormous red sentence and the building beneath him. What might look like a relatively simple stencil when reproduced on a page becomes considerably more unsettling when encountered several metres above a San Francisco street.

If At First You Don't Succeed – Call An Airstrike is one of Banksy's most direct anti-war works, but its effectiveness lies in how little it actually depicts. There are no soldiers, aircraft, explosions or casualties. There is only a child, a gas mask and a sentence.

The humor arrives first. Banksy takes one of childhood's most harmless lessons—keep trying—and subjects it to the logic of military escalation. Then the figure beside the words changes the tone. The child is already wearing the gas mask, as though someone has followed the advice before.

That is where the joke stops being entirely funny. The airstrike is absent from the picture. Its consequences are standing right beside the words.