At first glance, the text on this piece looks like a familiar motivational saying: if at first you don’t succeed, try again. Banksy changes the second half of the sentence, and the result reads: “If at first you don’t succeed, call an airstrike”.

The piece appeared in May 2010 in San Francisco, in the North Beach district, at the junction of Broadway and Columbus Avenue. According to reports, two separate photographers documented the piece on site, on 6 and 8 May 2010.

The composition has two parts. Most of the wall is taken up by that sentence, written in large, thick red capital letters. Beside it, set higher up, stands the figure of a small child in a hooded sweatshirt, wearing a gas mask.

This child figure carries the whole weight of the piece. On its own, the text would have remained a sharp but abstract political joke. Placing the child there shows exactly who pays the price for that sentence. The gas mask makes the child both protected and already born into a poisoned world at the same time: there is protection, but there is also an environment that makes protection necessary.

The structure of the sentence is particularly sly. Motivational sayings belong to the language of personal development, celebrating patience and effort. When Banksy takes that language and attaches it to military logic, what results is a comment on how states and institutions really respond to failure: rather than trying to understand or negotiate, they simply escalate force. Building the sentence like a joke makes what it actually says even more unsettling.

The piece dates from the period when Banksy was particularly active in San Francisco in the spring of 2010. The artist left several works around the city at the same time as the US release of his documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, and these pieces quickly drew a great deal of local attention.

This piece stands as one of the best examples of Banksy’s text based work. There is almost no imagery at all. The whole piece rests on changing the final two words of a familiar phrase. But those two words are enough to turn an optimistic cliché into a doctrine of war.